I don't think you or myself as representatives of the developed world dying at an earlier age than can be provided by technology is in any way helping people who don't have access to meds in Africa.
Remember that if it wasn't for broad commercialization of these in the developed world, they wouldn't have even the little that they do.
Invest money in treating the cause of the problem, and you get a return (1/7th of the american national budget goes to health care, the vast majority of it for old people). If (eventually) people do not grow old due to peiodic treatment, you don't need nursing homes any more. Then, when you're not throwing that 1/7th down the toilet every year, woe and behold, you can feed african kids to your heart's delight. And several decades after we have those treatments, do will they, and you save quite a few of them too. Not everyone in Africa is starving, or for that matter jobless, you know.
If we'll have no treatments - then we've lost nothing. If we will, I'd love to call you on your offer when we're 80.
Do you want to die today? I sure as hell don't. I assume neither do you. Given my health remains intact, I see no day this assertion will ever change. Ever. If I'm 80 and medicine allows me to have a body wear-and-tear-wise comparable to a modern 55-year-old for the next 3 decades, I'm most definitely going to take that route. And were technology to allow it, I'd take it ad infinum.
Death solves nothing for nobody. Read that last link I posted.
Would you extend your wish to live longer to 6 billion other people on the planet? YES. Could the world continue to feed enough oil and gas and out-of-season food to 300 million Americans who are hundred plus years old? YES, You can use thorium to sustain all our energy needs for thousands of years to come. I find your question about the availability of food amusing in light of your country's obesity epidemic. Seriously, we've reached the stage where food in any quantity is abundant and cheap. Space is also abundant for the near and mid-term. I believe the biggest resource issue will be power, but like I said, we have enough thorium to sustain us for a long time yet, and by the time it runs out new power sources will have been tapped.
>> Would you send 19-year-olds to fight in Iraq (or wherever) while you lounged about in your 60th year of retirement? No. For the protocol, I'm an aussie, but we have our 19-year-olds in Iraq as well, and I strongly oppose it regardless of where I spend my retirement. I think it's neither within our national interest nor yours. I'd use the same dollar in pushing things like this kind of research rather than "liberate" Iraq from exporting oil in Euros.
>> I'd rather learn to live well and put up with my 75 or 80 years (i hope!) and then let someone else have a chance.
And I'd rather "put up" (I actually enjoy life. I like it. I don't just "put up" with it). and then let someone else have a chance too. but without the me dying bit. I don't think I need to die in order to make place for my two munchkins. Neither do I want my old man to die to make space for me. There's plenty space for all of us. Read the link I put up above. If people stopped dying of old age tomorrow (a very radical case we're not in any danger of seeing soon), the planet's population would grow by one large city per year. Hardly a change we would not have time to adjust to. Besides, in such an extreme case, people's biological clocks would effectively stop ticking and a large percentage of the population would not be pressured into having kids in the first 4 decades of their lives, effectively slowing down the birth rate and mitigating the growth rate. And that's before we suggested introducing more radical (e.g. china) or less radical (e.g. taxation) population growth measures.
>> No doubt the anti-aging researchers will solve this "problem" and you may get your way No. The anti-aging researchers will simply allow you to live longer, and deteriorate slower. Society as a whole will have to find ways of dealing with the problems that will arise (and have no doubt, some major ones will, and some very fundamental social structures will need to be changed to accomodate this new reality, but it's something we've done so much and so successfully in the last century and before that that particular bit is the one that has me least worried. Our social structures are designed to easily withstand and accomodate radical technologically-driven changes), but that will be out of the hands of the researchers and way out of their depth.
Debating it today, when the possibility to throw big money at it today is there is definitely not a bad thing. And the more attention this subject gets (and the more charity funds that get diverted to treating the problem and not the symptoms), the better.
>> There may even be a handful of gifted people who will benefit the world by having an extra 50 years of time in which to work. But that will be the exception.
That's bull.
Do you have to earn some social merit in order to be allowed access to antibiotics today? (one of the major causes of our current average lifespan being roughly twice and a half again that of people two centuries ago?)
No.
Everyone gets it. Everyone has a right to live. Any other agenda will have its propagator voted out of office by the majority of the public in any free-
If I had the kind of money these guys carry around, that's EXACTLY where I'd be plugging it.
Even for my smaller money, that is the one and only place I'd think of donating putting it.
There's nothing even remotely on the scale of the amount of good to humanity in general, to EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US, that comes close dealing aging a blow. The amount of subsequent evils this would postpone, reduce or even, at some point, completely obliterate, from cancer to heart disease to any other form of our bodies growing frail, falling apart, and eventually killing 100,000 of us *each day*, is by many orders of magnitude bigger than feeding any number of kids in Africa. In the long term, even to the kids in Africa themselves.
Every dollar in places such as the multi-million M-Prize competition encourages 10-20$ in research, if past competitions such as the X-Prize are to serve as an indicator.
Every dollar spent on targeted research (as opposed to research for the sake of research, only stumbling on useful anti-aging applications by chance) towards fixing things we *know* deteriorate in our bodies and that ideas (that require research) on how to fixing them are on the table, is nothing short of helping humanity as a whole. In the most literal sense of the word. Every dollar there increases our (read: your and my) chances of benefiting from them and living *significantly* longer (read: more than the 5-8 years on average that the linear graph anticipates for us at this stage. 15 Would be great. 25 Would be wonderful. And if those 25 get us to the point when better treatments are available that can keep us vigorous another 15 years, you won't see me objecting to that either).
Your sarcasm as put forth by the quotes is misplaced.
Real Anti-Aging research (as opposed to the cosmetic/snake-oil industry that shares the same name) that targets aging on the cellular level, is the by-far single most important charity one can donate to.
You have to add the "how long it takes to burn n DVD's and pack them on the sending side, and how long it takes to unpack, stick in a drive and read them on the receiving side.
And we haven't even started talking latency yet....
>> True. But that still leaves the matter of OS (and 3rd-party) support. With today's software, can you imagine 8 mice (in separate rooms) competing over the same cursor?
There *IS* software that does this.
I even said I use it in my car.
You might need to pay Jetway a bit more to use it on an 8-console rig, and you'd definitely need to be using a magic-twin enabled mobo, but it works. It splits your windows into several desktops, each with its own kb, mouse and sound card. Connecting the actual keyboards and mice and sound cards is the easy bit. all you need is a USB hub.
I'm not gonna spoon-feed you. Go google it. Yes, it works. Run MPEG4 on seperate consoles, you can play games on one and watch movies on the other, it works.
The real limitation, as someone here pretty much pointed out, is the limited range of DVI cables.
I'm not sure you're right. How much power do you need for your 8 PC's at home? Let's assume no more than one of them is actually a gaming rig. Let's assume 2 more are MPEG-4 decoding boxes. Let's assume another two run office apps. All concurrently.
Prioritize your processes properly and a dual-core dual-processor rig will do this with modern mid-range processors.
You can even do this with windows using Jetway's Magic-Twin (I do this with 2 seperate consoles and WinXP in my car).
Further, due to all your harddrives being piled in one place serving everyone, you get both a RAID-5 volume, a secondary backup volume to back up your entire RAID5, and if you really want to you can go RAID6 as well. And you get to pool everyone's unused space together, greatly optimizing disk usage.
RAM will be in demand, but not really a problem you can't solve with 4 1-Gig DIMMs stuck in, (and a Gigabyte I-RAM with another 4G for swap if you really want to go overboard... though I'd wait for the SATA2 version).
Another great benefit is QUIET. the machine will be stuck away somewhere and make a lot of noise. Fans, drives, the works. your 8 workstations though will be silent as a grave.
There's several other quirks you'd have to work out such as external peripherals (USB2 hubs wherever applicable), packet shaping for that 15-year-old daughter who wants to run P2P apps, and you'd have to keep the system clean of adware or else.
All in all, for the amount of money 8 new entry-level home PC's would cost, I could build a hydra that would knock the socks of your home box both in data reliability, speed, storage space, noiselessness and bragging rights, whereas availability stretches both ways (lose the mobo and you're fucked all the way, but lose a DIMM, lose a CPU and your box is slightly slower till you get it replaced, lose a drive and you don't even feel it). Performance-wise it'd rock too, as most of the users are not using disk I/O most of the time, and a simple software SATA raid5 (or even a H/W one) with new drives would easily go into the 200-400MB/sec ballpark and when only one of the users is doing something that needs disk I/O it'd fly.
Build it around a 3U or 4U chasis with server H/W and you're set:-)
Laptops will only replace desktops so long as they (unlike desktops, today, here in Australia) are recognized expenses for tax purposes. Otherwise, most people won't buy them because most people don't need them.
Otherwise, given you move between an office and your home and don't really need a PC anywhere else, why pay for a machine of a family [a] inherently more expensive due to their monolithic construction [b] underpowered as compared to desktops (cpuwise, gpuwise, whether comparing strongest models of each or same-costing models of each, you name it) [c] much-more-expensive-to-fix (tried replacing the fan on your laptop CPU lately?) [d] mechanically expire much sooner (from the keyboard to the optical drive to the plastic shell) [e] more limited in storage capacity (you can stick in less drives, which are also smaller (and more expensive) due to form factor) [f] unupgradeable in some avenues (CPU, in most cases GPU, etc).
When you can just buy a desktop?
Desktops are cheap, easily mainainable and have a longer expiry time. It's 747 vs Concorde all over again. Less drastic, as unlike the concord, the laptop definitely has its applicaitons for the price it costs, but replacing desktops? Bah. Nowhere on the horizon.
I've states something very obvious (yet utterly ignored) in a former thread on the subject exactly. I'll risk karma-whoring for the chance a game-developer will read it, So I'm re-posting it now:
The card offers an humongous amount of horsepower, yet the vast majority of people have monitors that can do 1280x1024 (most mid-sized LCDs out there) or 1600x1200 (most CRT's). So most of the power your card can produce above what a mid-range last-generation card (or high-range 2-gen-old card) can produce is largely unused.
All of these new cards will give more than playable rates at either of these resolutions on most modern games without breaking a sweat, the heavier game engines requiring you to drop a notch or two on the FSAA or AF.
In fact, even my trusty OEM Radeon 9700 Pro bought December 2002 for 270$ does that just fine.
But where is all that horsepower needed? The answer is obvious, and yet promptly ignored. All these cards have two outputs (at least). Which can very well work simultaneously in a game, thank you very much. If one LCD can't go over 1280x1024, why not have two?
I run a two-monitor setup on my Rad (Dual Samsung 172X's). Both nVidia and ATI drivers support spanning (turning all outputs into one virtual very large screen). Three problems arise that require attention for this to work in gaming:
1. The game must support using SPAN. Many games (UT2k4, NWN, Fable, etc.) support this reasonably.
2. Unrelated to Issue #1 above, the game must support *weird* aspect ratios. Contrary to popular belief, unlike 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 - the 1280x1024 res, what our modern LCD's do best is not 4x3. It is 5x4. Do the math. The next 4x3 notch is 1280x960. The 5x4 aspect ratio aside, dual monitors give some very new AR's altogether - 8x3 for two 4x3 monitors, or 10x4 AR for two 1280's side by side. Fable, for example, while putting the rendered picture within my virtual 10x4 display area neatly, promptly puts the (quite essential) dialog subs and game choices outside the viewable area because it is unfamiliar with this aspect raito.
3. Not a showstopper, but very easy to work around if only the game devs would give it one ounce of thought:
Most action in almost any type of game (bar, perhaps, RTS's) happens dead in the center of your display. Which is good if you're playing with three displays, all important stuff happening flat in the center of your middle one, but with the simple solution 90% of people can affort and implement - purchase an additional monitor and hook it up to their existing dual-head-supporting graphics card - all the action happens right on top of the split between the two monitors. Things like your character in NWN (which properly gets split by 2cm (if you're lucky and chose your monitors wisely - 5cm if you're not) of space in the middle, looking somewhat 'fat') to that little pixel marking the business end of my sniper rifle in UT. VERY annoying (though I got used to it, to an extent, and it's very much worth the wider viewport).
GAME DEVELOPERS, PLEASE, PRETTY PRETTY PLEASE, PUT AN OPTION IN THE CONFIG TO OFFCENTER THE GAME HAPPENINGS SO THE CENTER OF THE GAME IS... 40% FROM THE LEFT EDGE AND 60% FROM THE RIGHT (OR OTHERWISE ADJUSTABLE) OF THE DISPLAY. IT'S OUTRIGHT A NEUCANSE! TIA.
Those issues aside (and with some, at least the former two issues definitely are), two monitors and a 2560x1024 resolution would give even the newest GPU (with FSAA, AF and shadow rendering cranked up to max of course) a very decent workout, and put all that unuseable horsepower on the fringes of the useable realm.
You're right of course. Trust within reason. No need to email the root passwords to your servers to the company's main mailing list.
My point is like there's no point building a house with one wall missing yet locking the door, in the same manner there is no point preventing users from one avenue of connecting portable media to their office PC's without shutting down the rest of the avenues too - one method is enough for a person with malevolent intentions to swipe data away.
It only makes sense if you do the whole shabang across the board, plus you don't mind boldly proclaiming to your employees that you don't trust them - quite an acceptable policy for a bank or financial institution, yet one that can seriously compromise the way employees look upon you as an employer in other, more relaxes environments, such as a hitech company owned/run by geeks who value it's atmosphere and it being a fun place to work.
Most businesses weigh in the pros and cons of the mistrust approach and conclude it's plain not worth the hassle (and those that think it is worth the hassle typically have a good reason to think so.)
What the article does is proclaims, in quite an infantile way that "Your car can't carry 10 tons of cargo". The obvious answer to that is "Of course it can't - buying a TRUCK was not financially justifiable, I didn't need one, which is why I bought a CAR".
Is the issue called trust. Specifically, towards people on the inside of your organization.
It all boils down to "Do you trust your employees"?
There are businesses that do, and there are those that don't.
Those that do work on the assumption an employee will not do anything to harm the business intentionally - take a file he is exposed to during work and transfer it somewhere outside the organization.
Hence, it will not take all measures required to prevent him from doing so.
A business that does worry about such things will - What you carry will be checked at the door. Your PC will be locked (the case, physically locked). No Floppy, CD-R, USB, no means to connect media you bring from home. Internet access will be so restricted you wouldn't even be able to encapsulate an SSH tunnel over DNS packets you kindly ask your DNS server/proxy to send for you. And so forth.
Pointing at a business where everyone has web access and a dell sitting on his desk with 2 USB ports looking at him and saying "Hey, this guy can copy a confidential word document on the USB key" is hardly news, doesn't bother anyone in the first type of organization, and usually a non-issue in the second (which would have taken excessive measures to prevent exactly this kind of thing).
I don't know about all you wackos with the 600$ CPU's and 600$ RAID controllers at home, but I have better things to do with my money. Like invest it rather than spend it on useless trinkets, theoretical seek-time figures and unused gigaflops.
Here's my brew:
1. Old PC. Any one would do, probbably even a good'ol P1. 128MB RAM is more than enough. I consider this FREE. I run a dual-PIII-450MHz that I have lying around. 2. 4x[BIG-SATA-DRIVE]. How big? When I built mine, highest bang-for-buck was 250GB. So I went with 4 of those. 3. 1x PCI SATA controller. 4. 1x PCI GbE NIC.
[3] and [4] are peanuts. [2] is worth, what, 500$?
The entire rig will easily give you ~10-25MB/sec, which is, for any home use I can consider including pumping 10GB files over the network, plain enough.
Plug any crap old 2GB or greater IDE harddrive in for sport (or two and do yourself a RAID1 configuration). Install Linux. Install SAMBA. Configure RAID. Set up healthchecks that email you if something in/proc/mdstat is wrong.
[OPTIONAL] 1. Grab several old IDE drives. Not neccesarily same sizes. 2. Stick them in some other box (I did it on my windoze box cuz that's where I had case space). 3. Configure a RAID0, or better yet, a spanned volume. Use windoze dynamic disks, use LVM, whatever makes your boat float. Set up a compressed filesystem if you think that would help any. Usually, with the kind of things people store on huge arrays at home, it won't. 4. Do a daily dump of everything from your RAID to your backup array.
DONE. Forget about it and go do something better with your time.
{brag} Disclaimer: I have a [real] CarPC (Ignore the Hebrew, I'm posting it for the pix). I built the thing myself from components, none of that pesky proprietary overpriced 1-DIN crap. FlexATX form factor NF2 NB, Athlon XP 1700+, Jetway Mobo (cannibalized off a Jetway 765 SFF-PC) to support two independant consoles under Windows XP (using their MagicTwin XP-tweaking driver). Yes, it functions like 2 separate PC's. Yes, it plays 2 MPEG-4 streams simultaneosly. No it doesn't run Linux or BSD (only good CarPC software is for windows). Thus, I'm confident that to a degree I know what I'm talking about. {/brag}
Now: A CarPC requires three functions from it's entire power rig:
1. Poweron-poweroff logic (i.e. ignition key on-> short mobo power switch, stop responding to anything else for 60 secs until OS boots, keyoff -> same thing,etc etc etc).
2. Stabilize car battery voltage to a single, stable DC rail. (Mine is 19V, other configurations can have other power levels. It doesn't really matter). A subset of this and a very useful feature is to monitor input voltage and utterly cut off the PC when it hits a minimal threshold, to prevent deep discharge of the battery. That's because a PC will consume ~200mA of current even when it's off over its 5Vsb rail.
2. Split up that big mama rail using a DC2DC into the various rails the PC requires. Depending on your PC, you may need higher or lower powered DC2DC's. My rig runs the CPU off the 12V rail and thus requires 2.5 amps off that rail, making most DC2DC's (such as the M1-ATX, which was designed with "mini-itx" in mind) insufficient for my rig.
Now, different products cater to different subsets of those three requirements. An M1-ATX will do all three, but will not feed a desktop-CPU (unless the mobo feeds that CPU off the 5V rail).
A Carnetix CNX-P1900 will do [1] and [2] mighty well, and is designed to work alongside a Travla C138 or C139 which does [3] (this is the configuration I use in my car).
The product discussed here fulfills [3] and would do me very good (were I building a new rig). It would substitute a 120mm x 80mm x 15mm daughterboard (or something along those lines) and a big mother of an ATX cable crammed into a home-made aluminum box the size of a 4-year-old laptop (that is already crammed full, with a mobo, a harddrive, a 1U AthlonMP heatsink+fan and,north-bridge heatsink+fanm, this daughterboard and a shitload of cabling) with restricted airflow (see pics above). The cute little PSU is good and it definitely fits the bill for a CarPC.
1. Stock el-cheapo PSU. 2. 80mm Vantec Stealth fan to replace original one. Maybe zalman has a standalone standard 80mm fan, which, if they do, probbably comes with a nifty little rheostat to control the RPM.
The card offers an humongous amount of horsepower, yet the vast majority of people have monitors that can do 1280x1024 (most mid-sized LCDs out there) or 1600x1200 (most CRT's). So most of the power your card can produce above what a mid-range last-generation card (or high-range 2-gen-old card) can produce is largely unused.
All of these new cards will give more than playable rates at either of these resolutions on most modern games without breaking a sweat, the heavier game engines requiring you to drop a notch or two on the FSAA or AF.
In fact, even my trusty OEM Radeon 9700 Pro bought December 2002 for 270$ does that just fine.
But where is all that horsepower needed? The answer is obvious, and yet promptly ignored. All these cards have two outputs (at least). Which can very well work simultaneously in a game, thank you very much. If one LCD can't go over 1280x1024, why not have two?
I run a two-monitor setup on my Rad (Dual Samsung 172X's). Both nVidia and ATI drivers support spanning (turning all outputs into one virtual very large screen). Three problems arise that require attention for this to work in gaming:
1. The game must support using SPAN. Many games (UT2k4, NWN, Fable, etc.) support this reasonably.
2. Unrelated to Issue #1 above, the game must support *weird* aspect ratios. Contrary to popular belief, unlike 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 - the 1280x1024 res, what our modern LCD's do best is not 4x3. It is 5x4. Do the math. The next 4x3 notch is 1280x960. The 5x4 aspect ratio aside, dual monitors give some very new AR's altogether - 8x3 for two 4x3 monitors, or 10x4 AR for two 1280's side by side. Fable, for example, while putting the rendered picture within my virtual 10x4 display area neatly, promptly puts the (quite essential) dialog subs and game choices outside the viewable area because it is unfamiliar with this aspect raito.
3. Not a showstopper, but very easy to work around if only the game devs would give it one ounce of thought:
Most action in almost any type of game (bar, perhaps, RTS's) happens dead in the center of your display. Which is good if you're playing with three displays, all important stuff happening flat in the center of your middle one, but with the simple solution 90% of people can affort and implement - purchase an additional monitor and hook it up to their existing dual-head-supporting graphics card - all the action happens right on top of the split between the two monitors. Things like your character in NWN (which properly gets split by 2cm (if you're lucky and chose your monitors wisely - 5cm if you're not) of space in the middle, looking somewhat 'fat') to that little pixel marking the business end of my sniper rifle in UT. VERY annoying (though I got used to it, to an extent, and it's very much worth the wider viewport).
GAME DEVELOPERS, PLEASE, PRETTY PRETTY PLEASE, PUT AN OPTION IN THE CONFIG TO OFFCENTER THE GAME HAPPENINGS SO THE CENTER OF THE GAME IS... 40% FROM THE LEFT EDGE AND 60% FROM THE RIGHT (OR OTHERWISE ADJUSTABLE) OF THE DISPLAY. IT'S OUTRIGHT A NEUCANSE! TIA.
Those issues aside (and with some, at least the former two issues definitely are), two monitors and a 2560x1024 resolution would give even the newest GPU (with FSAA, AF and shadow rendering cranked up to max of course) a very decent workout, and put all that unuseable horsepower on the fringes of the useable realm.
... And what I meant by "default sight" is the two bitties of the metal assembly you get on the weapon. Pardon me not being keen on the English terminology, in Hebrew the word 'sight' refelcts whatever mechanism you use to take aim, be it optical or two bits of metal that you get lined up. If it fails to fall in the 'sight' designation due to not having optics - make a name for it and I'll bite.
You do have a point with 7.62mm ammo being longer-range than 5.56, and that neither is designated sniper ammo. regardless, I've hit targets at 250m an up with a long-barrel M16 with no difficulty, and I'm by no means a professional. So an M-16 *can* be used as such a weapon, as can any long-barrel assault rifle, to an extent.
An AK47 (or any spinoff thereof) is a lousy sniper weapon. The sight (both default or addon) is located on a somewhat loose and wobbly firing mechanism cover, which is thereby very hard to properly calibrate. An M16 or derivate would serve as a significantly better and longer-range sniper weapon.
Real cause to worry from long-range sniper fire is when the bad guys get their hands on real sniper weapons, like an M42, or worse, a 'light.50'
I'm not siding with the grandparent's gloom & doom outlook on elevators, just pointing out that elevator-worthy material *might* reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude for conventional rocketry with some conceptual modifications -
chucking a rocket into orbit requires it to have two things - a. Mass to dispose of (m1v1 + m2v2 = MV) b. Energy, to be translated into the kinetic energy of the mass being disposed.
Now, let's give conventional launch the same available technology as the entity who is building an earth space elevator has - uberlight material and lasers.
Take something that looks like the shuttle. throw the engine out. Fill the external fuel tank with some other, MUCH LIGHTER stuff (e.g. the *mass*), remembering mass is *not* weight, that need the same characteristics as current propellant - e.g. doesn't explode.
Build the frame from your uberlight material.
Now put a ground laser on it, which will give the shuttle *energy*. enough to heat/accelerate your mass out the back end, and push you up.
I'm not implying this has or can be done, just that "rocket" propulsion *may* be able to drop, no idea how much, if given the same technologies you'd have lying around when you're contemplating starting to build a space elevator.
Having conquered the chart as the most populistic marvel of stupidity ever to leave the mouth of a NASA official, I have taken immediate action and incorporated it in my sig.
As of yet, no official statement has been received from NASA as to where exactly it is they do wish to go.
A marketing guy and a technical supporter decide to open a bearhide business in Alaska.
So they get all prepped up, rent a cabin in the woods...
The marketing guy says "I'll go get us a bear". So, he disappears into the woods. An hour passes, two hours.... three hours... the techie's waiting next to the cabin, but the marketing guy doesn't come back.
After another hour, a sound can be heard coming from the woods... it seems to be getting nearer...
"...aaaaaaa!!...".. and nearer.. "...aaaAAA!!...".. and nearer still... "... AAAAAAARGHAHAAAAAA!!!!"
All of a sudden the marketing guy bursts out of the woods, running, panic stricken, towards the hut's door, a humongous 18-foot grizzly roaring and lumbering not 20 feet behind him, blood and death in its eyes.
He reaches the hut door in the nick of time, moves aside at the last moment, letting the grizzly barge right into the hut.
The tech supporter slams the door behind the grizzly, and properly bars it from the outside.
After catching his breath and exchanging glances with his companion, the marketing guy looks at the tech supporter and says
"All right. You handle him, I'm going to get us another one"
It puts yet another country off-limits for ad-scum, not only to operate from, but even to live there while operating an ad company in zimbabwe.
It's not a silver bullet and shouldn't be treated as such. It won't make adware vanish. But if more and more counties say "NOT ON OUR SOIL" to this (and same goes for anything from child porn, to snuff films, to terrorist camps), it make it harder for said scum to operate (especially when they live in those counties and are subject to being sued). Consider this - some of the people who live in those countries, do this and do not look to relocating will look away from such practice (same as they do from, say, theft), thus such legislation *will* decrease the scale of the problem.
They're correct by looking at it as any other form of crime, assuming that completely killing it is not within our means, but instead looking at mitigating it through legislation.
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I don't think you or myself as representatives of the developed world dying at an earlier age than can be provided by technology is in any way helping people who don't have access to meds in Africa.
Remember that if it wasn't for broad commercialization of these in the developed world, they wouldn't have even the little that they do.
Invest money in treating the cause of the problem, and you get a return (1/7th of the american national budget goes to health care, the vast majority of it for old people). If (eventually) people do not grow old due to peiodic treatment, you don't need nursing homes any more. Then, when you're not throwing that 1/7th down the toilet every year, woe and behold, you can feed african kids to your heart's delight. And several decades after we have those treatments, do will they, and you save quite a few of them too. Not everyone in Africa is starving, or for that matter jobless, you know.
If we'll have no treatments - then we've lost nothing. If we will, I'd love to call you on your offer when we're 80.
Do you want to die today? I sure as hell don't. I assume neither do you.
Given my health remains intact, I see no day this assertion will ever change. Ever.
If I'm 80 and medicine allows me to have a body wear-and-tear-wise comparable to a modern 55-year-old for the next 3 decades, I'm most definitely going to take that route. And were technology to allow it, I'd take it ad infinum.
Death solves nothing for nobody. Read that last link I posted.
Would you extend your wish to live longer to 6 billion other people on the planet?
YES.
Could the world continue to feed enough oil and gas and out-of-season food to 300 million Americans who are hundred plus years old?
YES, You can use thorium to sustain all our energy needs for thousands of years to come. I find your question about the availability of food amusing in light of your country's obesity epidemic. Seriously, we've reached the stage where food in any quantity is abundant and cheap. Space is also abundant for the near and mid-term. I believe the biggest resource issue will be power, but like I said, we have enough thorium to sustain us for a long time yet, and by the time it runs out new power sources will have been tapped.
>> Would you send 19-year-olds to fight in Iraq (or wherever) while you lounged about in your 60th year of retirement?
No. For the protocol, I'm an aussie, but we have our 19-year-olds in Iraq as well, and I strongly oppose it regardless of where I spend my retirement. I think it's neither within our national interest nor yours.
I'd use the same dollar in pushing things like this kind of research rather than "liberate" Iraq from exporting oil in Euros.
>> I'd rather learn to live well and put up with my 75 or 80 years (i hope!) and then let someone else have a chance.
And I'd rather "put up" (I actually enjoy life. I like it. I don't just "put up" with it). and then let someone else have a chance too. but without the me dying bit. I don't think I need to die in order to make place for my two munchkins. Neither do I want my old man to die to make space for me. There's plenty space for all of us.
Read the link I put up above. If people stopped dying of old age tomorrow (a very radical case we're not in any danger of seeing soon), the planet's population would grow by one large city per year. Hardly a change we would not have time to adjust to. Besides, in such an extreme case, people's biological clocks would effectively stop ticking and a large percentage of the population would not be pressured into having kids in the first 4 decades of their lives, effectively slowing down the birth rate and mitigating the growth rate. And that's before we suggested introducing more radical (e.g. china) or less radical (e.g. taxation) population growth measures.
>> No doubt the anti-aging researchers will solve this "problem" and you may get your way
No. The anti-aging researchers will simply allow you to live longer, and deteriorate slower. Society as a whole will have to find ways of dealing with the problems that will arise (and have no doubt, some major ones will, and some very fundamental social structures will need to be changed to accomodate this new reality, but it's something we've done so much and so successfully in the last century and before that that particular bit is the one that has me least worried. Our social structures are designed to easily withstand and accomodate radical technologically-driven changes), but that will be out of the hands of the researchers and way out of their depth.
Debating it today, when the possibility to throw big money at it today is there is definitely not a bad thing. And the more attention this subject gets (and the more charity funds that get diverted to treating the problem and not the symptoms), the better.
>> There may even be a handful of gifted people who will benefit the world by having an extra 50 years of time in which to work. But that will be the exception.
That's bull.
Do you have to earn some social merit in order to be allowed access to antibiotics today? (one of the major causes of our current average lifespan being roughly twice and a half again that of people two centuries ago?)
No.
Everyone gets it. Everyone has a right to live. Any other agenda will have its propagator voted out of office by the majority of the public in any free-
If I had the kind of money these guys carry around, that's EXACTLY where I'd be plugging it.
Even for my smaller money, that is the one and only place I'd think of donating putting it.
There's nothing even remotely on the scale of the amount of good to humanity in general, to EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US, that comes close dealing aging a blow. The amount of subsequent evils this would postpone, reduce or even, at some point, completely obliterate, from cancer to heart disease to any other form of our bodies growing frail, falling apart, and eventually killing 100,000 of us *each day*, is by many orders of magnitude bigger than feeding any number of kids in Africa. In the long term, even to the kids in Africa themselves.
Every dollar in places such as the multi-million M-Prize competition encourages 10-20$ in research, if past competitions such as the X-Prize are to serve as an indicator.
Every dollar spent on targeted research (as opposed to research for the sake of research, only stumbling on useful anti-aging applications by chance) towards fixing things we *know* deteriorate in our bodies and that ideas (that require research) on how to fixing them are on the table, is nothing short of helping humanity as a whole. In the most literal sense of the word. Every dollar there increases our (read: your and my) chances of benefiting from them and living *significantly* longer (read: more than the 5-8 years on average that the linear graph anticipates for us at this stage. 15 Would be great. 25 Would be wonderful. And if those 25 get us to the point when better treatments are available that can keep us vigorous another 15 years, you won't see me objecting to that either).
Your sarcasm as put forth by the quotes is misplaced.
Real Anti-Aging research (as opposed to the cosmetic/snake-oil industry that shares the same name) that targets aging on the cellular level, is the by-far single most important charity one can donate to.
If the word "hacker" (or perhaps the concept and the word's relation to it) is to be traced,
:-)
A 'hacker' is "one who makes furniture with an axe".
One big thing you missed...
You have to add the "how long it takes to burn n DVD's and pack them on the sending side, and how long it takes to unpack, stick in a drive and read them on the receiving side.
And we haven't even started talking latency yet....
>> True. But that still leaves the matter of OS (and 3rd-party) support. With today's software, can you imagine 8 mice (in separate rooms) competing over the same cursor?
There *IS* software that does this.
I even said I use it in my car.
You might need to pay Jetway a bit more to use it on an 8-console rig, and you'd definitely need to be using a magic-twin enabled mobo, but it works. It splits your windows into several desktops, each with its own kb, mouse and sound card. Connecting the actual keyboards and mice and sound cards is the easy bit. all you need is a USB hub.
I'm not gonna spoon-feed you. Go google it.
Yes, it works. Run MPEG4 on seperate consoles, you can play games on one and watch movies on the other, it works.
The real limitation, as someone here pretty much pointed out, is the limited range of DVI cables.
I'm not sure you're right.
:-)
How much power do you need for your 8 PC's at home?
Let's assume no more than one of them is actually a gaming rig.
Let's assume 2 more are MPEG-4 decoding boxes.
Let's assume another two run office apps. All concurrently.
Prioritize your processes properly and a dual-core dual-processor rig will do this with modern mid-range processors.
You can even do this with windows using Jetway's Magic-Twin (I do this with 2 seperate consoles and WinXP in my car).
Further, due to all your harddrives being piled in one place serving everyone, you get both a RAID-5 volume, a secondary backup volume to back up your entire RAID5, and if you really want to you can go RAID6 as well. And you get to pool everyone's unused space together, greatly optimizing disk usage.
RAM will be in demand, but not really a problem you can't solve with 4 1-Gig DIMMs stuck in, (and a Gigabyte I-RAM with another 4G for swap if you really want to go overboard... though I'd wait for the SATA2 version).
Another great benefit is QUIET. the machine will be stuck away somewhere and make a lot of noise. Fans, drives, the works. your 8 workstations though will be silent as a grave.
There's several other quirks you'd have to work out such as external peripherals (USB2 hubs wherever applicable), packet shaping for that 15-year-old daughter who wants to run P2P apps, and you'd have to keep the system clean of adware or else.
All in all, for the amount of money 8 new entry-level home PC's would cost, I could build a hydra that would knock the socks of your home box both in data reliability, speed, storage space, noiselessness and bragging rights, whereas availability stretches both ways (lose the mobo and you're fucked all the way, but lose a DIMM, lose a CPU and your box is slightly slower till you get it replaced, lose a drive and you don't even feel it). Performance-wise it'd rock too, as most of the users are not using disk I/O most of the time, and a simple software SATA raid5 (or even a H/W one) with new drives would easily go into the 200-400MB/sec ballpark and when only one of the users is doing something that needs disk I/O it'd fly.
Build it around a 3U or 4U chasis with server H/W and you're set
I agree with the grandpa post.
Laptops will only replace desktops so long as they (unlike desktops, today, here in Australia) are recognized expenses for tax purposes. Otherwise, most people won't buy them because most people don't need them.
Otherwise, given you move between an office and your home and don't really need a PC anywhere else, why pay for a machine of a family
[a] inherently more expensive due to their monolithic construction
[b] underpowered as compared to desktops (cpuwise, gpuwise, whether comparing strongest models of each or same-costing models of each, you name it)
[c] much-more-expensive-to-fix (tried replacing the fan on your laptop CPU lately?)
[d] mechanically expire much sooner (from the keyboard to the optical drive to the plastic shell)
[e] more limited in storage capacity (you can stick in less drives, which are also smaller (and more expensive) due to form factor)
[f] unupgradeable in some avenues (CPU, in most cases GPU, etc).
When you can just buy a desktop?
Desktops are cheap, easily mainainable and have a longer expiry time.
It's 747 vs Concorde all over again. Less drastic, as unlike the concord, the laptop definitely has its applicaitons for the price it costs, but replacing desktops? Bah. Nowhere on the horizon.
>> By determining how many dimensions exist, Hewett and Rizzo hope to either confirm or repudiate string theory
You cannot confirm a theory.
An experiment can either support it or disprove ("repudiate") it.
I've states something very obvious (yet utterly ignored) in a former thread on the subject exactly. I'll risk karma-whoring for the chance a game-developer will read it, So I'm re-posting it now:
... 40% FROM THE LEFT EDGE AND 60% FROM THE RIGHT (OR OTHERWISE ADJUSTABLE) OF THE DISPLAY. IT'S OUTRIGHT A NEUCANSE! TIA.
The card offers an humongous amount of horsepower, yet the vast majority of people have monitors that can do 1280x1024 (most mid-sized LCDs out there) or 1600x1200 (most CRT's). So most of the power your card can produce above what a mid-range last-generation card (or high-range 2-gen-old card) can produce is largely unused.
All of these new cards will give more than playable rates at either of these resolutions on most modern games without breaking a sweat, the heavier game engines requiring you to drop a notch or two on the FSAA or AF.
In fact, even my trusty OEM Radeon 9700 Pro bought December 2002 for 270$ does that just fine.
But where is all that horsepower needed? The answer is obvious, and yet promptly ignored. All these cards have two outputs (at least). Which can very well work simultaneously in a game, thank you very much. If one LCD can't go over 1280x1024, why not have two?
I run a two-monitor setup on my Rad (Dual Samsung 172X's). Both nVidia and ATI drivers support spanning (turning all outputs into one virtual very large screen). Three problems arise that require attention for this to work in gaming:
1. The game must support using SPAN. Many games (UT2k4, NWN, Fable, etc.) support this reasonably.
2. Unrelated to Issue #1 above, the game must support *weird* aspect ratios. Contrary to popular belief, unlike 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 - the 1280x1024 res, what our modern LCD's do best is not 4x3. It is 5x4. Do the math. The next 4x3 notch is 1280x960. The 5x4 aspect ratio aside, dual monitors give some very new AR's altogether - 8x3 for two 4x3 monitors, or 10x4 AR for two 1280's side by side. Fable, for example, while putting the rendered picture within my virtual 10x4 display area neatly, promptly puts the (quite essential) dialog subs and game choices outside the viewable area because it is unfamiliar with this aspect raito.
3. Not a showstopper, but very easy to work around if only the game devs would give it one ounce of thought:
Most action in almost any type of game (bar, perhaps, RTS's) happens dead in the center of your display. Which is good if you're playing with three displays, all important stuff happening flat in the center of your middle one, but with the simple solution 90% of people can affort and implement - purchase an additional monitor and hook it up to their existing dual-head-supporting graphics card - all the action happens right on top of the split between the two monitors. Things like your character in NWN (which properly gets split by 2cm (if you're lucky and chose your monitors wisely - 5cm if you're not) of space in the middle, looking somewhat 'fat') to that little pixel marking the business end of my sniper rifle in UT. VERY annoying (though I got used to it, to an extent, and it's very much worth the wider viewport).
GAME DEVELOPERS, PLEASE, PRETTY PRETTY PLEASE, PUT AN OPTION IN THE CONFIG TO OFFCENTER THE GAME HAPPENINGS SO THE CENTER OF THE GAME IS
Those issues aside (and with some, at least the former two issues definitely are), two monitors and a 2560x1024 resolution would give even the newest GPU (with FSAA, AF and shadow rendering cranked up to max of course) a very decent workout, and put all that unuseable horsepower on the fringes of the useable realm.
My two cents.
You're right of course. Trust within reason. No need to email the root passwords to your servers to the company's main mailing list.
My point is like there's no point building a house with one wall missing yet locking the door, in the same manner there is no point preventing users from one avenue of connecting portable media to their office PC's without shutting down the rest of the avenues too - one method is enough for a person with malevolent intentions to swipe data away.
It only makes sense if you do the whole shabang across the board, plus you don't mind boldly proclaiming to your employees that you don't trust them - quite an acceptable policy for a bank or financial institution, yet one that can seriously compromise the way employees look upon you as an employer in other, more relaxes environments, such as a hitech company owned/run by geeks who value it's atmosphere and it being a fun place to work.
Most businesses weigh in the pros and cons of the mistrust approach and conclude it's plain not worth the hassle (and those that think it is worth the hassle typically have a good reason to think so.)
What the article does is proclaims, in quite an infantile way that "Your car can't carry 10 tons of cargo". The obvious answer to that is "Of course it can't - buying a TRUCK was not financially justifiable, I didn't need one, which is why I bought a CAR".
If I may quote Homer Simpson,
DOH!
Is the issue called trust. Specifically, towards people on the inside of your organization.
It all boils down to "Do you trust your employees"?
There are businesses that do, and there are those that don't.
Those that do work on the assumption an employee will not do anything to harm the business intentionally - take a file he is exposed to during work and transfer it somewhere outside the organization.
Hence, it will not take all measures required to prevent him from doing so.
A business that does worry about such things will - What you carry will be checked at the door. Your PC will be locked (the case, physically locked). No Floppy, CD-R, USB, no means to connect media you bring from home. Internet access will be so restricted you wouldn't even be able to encapsulate an SSH tunnel over DNS packets you kindly ask your DNS server/proxy to send for you. And so forth.
Pointing at a business where everyone has web access and a dell sitting on his desk with 2 USB ports looking at him and saying "Hey, this guy can copy a confidential word document on the USB key" is hardly news, doesn't bother anyone in the first type of organization, and usually a non-issue in the second (which would have taken excessive measures to prevent exactly this kind of thing).
Nothing to see here, move along.
I don't know about all you wackos with the 600$ CPU's and 600$ RAID controllers at home, but I have better things to do with my money. Like invest it rather than spend it on useless trinkets, theoretical seek-time figures and unused gigaflops.
/proc/mdstat is wrong.
Here's my brew:
1. Old PC. Any one would do, probbably even a good'ol P1. 128MB RAM is more than enough. I consider this FREE. I run a dual-PIII-450MHz that I have lying around.
2. 4x[BIG-SATA-DRIVE]. How big? When I built mine, highest bang-for-buck was 250GB. So I went with 4 of those.
3. 1x PCI SATA controller.
4. 1x PCI GbE NIC.
[3] and [4] are peanuts. [2] is worth, what, 500$?
The entire rig will easily give you ~10-25MB/sec, which is, for any home use I can consider including pumping 10GB files over the network, plain enough.
Plug any crap old 2GB or greater IDE harddrive in for sport (or two and do yourself a RAID1 configuration).
Install Linux.
Install SAMBA.
Configure RAID.
Set up healthchecks that email you if something in
[OPTIONAL]
1. Grab several old IDE drives. Not neccesarily same sizes.
2. Stick them in some other box (I did it on my windoze box cuz that's where I had case space).
3. Configure a RAID0, or better yet, a spanned volume. Use windoze dynamic disks, use LVM, whatever makes your boat float. Set up a compressed filesystem if you think that would help any. Usually, with the kind of things people store on huge arrays at home, it won't.
4. Do a daily dump of everything from your RAID to your backup array.
DONE. Forget about it and go do something better with your time.
You're wrong.
,north-bridge heatsink+fanm, this daughterboard and a shitload of cabling) with restricted airflow (see pics above). The cute little PSU is good and it definitely fits the bill for a CarPC.
{brag} Disclaimer: I have a [real] CarPC (Ignore the Hebrew, I'm posting it for the pix). I built the thing myself from components, none of that pesky proprietary overpriced 1-DIN crap. FlexATX form factor NF2 NB, Athlon XP 1700+, Jetway Mobo (cannibalized off a Jetway 765 SFF-PC) to support two independant consoles under Windows XP (using their MagicTwin XP-tweaking driver). Yes, it functions like 2 separate PC's. Yes, it plays 2 MPEG-4 streams simultaneosly. No it doesn't run Linux or BSD (only good CarPC software is for windows). Thus, I'm confident that to a degree I know what I'm talking about. {/brag}
Now:
A CarPC requires three functions from it's entire power rig:
1. Poweron-poweroff logic (i.e. ignition key on-> short mobo power switch, stop responding to anything else for 60 secs until OS boots, keyoff -> same thing,etc etc etc).
2. Stabilize car battery voltage to a single, stable DC rail. (Mine is 19V, other configurations can have other power levels. It doesn't really matter). A subset of this and a very useful feature is to monitor input voltage and utterly cut off the PC when it hits a minimal threshold, to prevent deep discharge of the battery. That's because a PC will consume ~200mA of current even when it's off over its 5Vsb rail.
2. Split up that big mama rail using a DC2DC into the various rails the PC requires. Depending on your PC, you may need higher or lower powered DC2DC's. My rig runs the CPU off the 12V rail and thus requires 2.5 amps off that rail, making most DC2DC's (such as the M1-ATX, which was designed with "mini-itx" in mind) insufficient for my rig.
Now, different products cater to different subsets of those three requirements.
An M1-ATX will do all three, but will not feed a desktop-CPU (unless the mobo feeds that CPU off the 5V rail).
A Carnetix CNX-P1900 will do [1] and [2] mighty well, and is designed to work alongside a Travla C138 or C139 which does [3] (this is the configuration I use in my car).
The product discussed here fulfills [3] and would do me very good (were I building a new rig). It would substitute a 120mm x 80mm x 15mm daughterboard (or something along those lines) and a big mother of an ATX cable crammed into a home-made aluminum box the size of a 4-year-old laptop (that is already crammed full, with a mobo, a harddrive, a 1U AthlonMP heatsink+fan and
And Kudos to the guys who made it.
1. Stock el-cheapo PSU.
2. 80mm Vantec Stealth fan to replace original one. Maybe zalman has a standalone standard 80mm fan, which, if they do, probbably comes with a nifty little rheostat to control the RPM.
Problem solved. On a budget.
First, go out on the street and randomly ask people about current events, a few historical figures, a couple of science questions, and geography
Ah. You must be American.
The card offers an humongous amount of horsepower, yet the vast majority of people have monitors that can do 1280x1024 (most mid-sized LCDs out there) or 1600x1200 (most CRT's). So most of the power your card can produce above what a mid-range last-generation card (or high-range 2-gen-old card) can produce is largely unused.
... 40% FROM THE LEFT EDGE AND 60% FROM THE RIGHT (OR OTHERWISE ADJUSTABLE) OF THE DISPLAY. IT'S OUTRIGHT A NEUCANSE! TIA.
All of these new cards will give more than playable rates at either of these resolutions on most modern games without breaking a sweat, the heavier game engines requiring you to drop a notch or two on the FSAA or AF.
In fact, even my trusty OEM Radeon 9700 Pro bought December 2002 for 270$ does that just fine.
But where is all that horsepower needed? The answer is obvious, and yet promptly ignored. All these cards have two outputs (at least). Which can very well work simultaneously in a game, thank you very much. If one LCD can't go over 1280x1024, why not have two?
I run a two-monitor setup on my Rad (Dual Samsung 172X's). Both nVidia and ATI drivers support spanning (turning all outputs into one virtual very large screen). Three problems arise that require attention for this to work in gaming:
1. The game must support using SPAN. Many games (UT2k4, NWN, Fable, etc.) support this reasonably.
2. Unrelated to Issue #1 above, the game must support *weird* aspect ratios. Contrary to popular belief, unlike 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 - the 1280x1024 res, what our modern LCD's do best is not 4x3. It is 5x4. Do the math. The next 4x3 notch is 1280x960. The 5x4 aspect ratio aside, dual monitors give some very new AR's altogether - 8x3 for two 4x3 monitors, or 10x4 AR for two 1280's side by side. Fable, for example, while putting the rendered picture within my virtual 10x4 display area neatly, promptly puts the (quite essential) dialog subs and game choices outside the viewable area because it is unfamiliar with this aspect raito.
3. Not a showstopper, but very easy to work around if only the game devs would give it one ounce of thought:
Most action in almost any type of game (bar, perhaps, RTS's) happens dead in the center of your display. Which is good if you're playing with three displays, all important stuff happening flat in the center of your middle one, but with the simple solution 90% of people can affort and implement - purchase an additional monitor and hook it up to their existing dual-head-supporting graphics card - all the action happens right on top of the split between the two monitors. Things like your character in NWN (which properly gets split by 2cm (if you're lucky and chose your monitors wisely - 5cm if you're not) of space in the middle, looking somewhat 'fat') to that little pixel marking the business end of my sniper rifle in UT. VERY annoying (though I got used to it, to an extent, and it's very much worth the wider viewport).
GAME DEVELOPERS, PLEASE, PRETTY PRETTY PLEASE, PUT AN OPTION IN THE CONFIG TO OFFCENTER THE GAME HAPPENINGS SO THE CENTER OF THE GAME IS
Those issues aside (and with some, at least the former two issues definitely are), two monitors and a 2560x1024 resolution would give even the newest GPU (with FSAA, AF and shadow rendering cranked up to max of course) a very decent workout, and put all that unuseable horsepower on the fringes of the useable realm.
My two cents.
... And what I meant by "default sight" is the two bitties of the metal assembly you get on the weapon.
Pardon me not being keen on the English terminology, in Hebrew the word 'sight' refelcts whatever mechanism you use to take aim, be it optical or two bits of metal that you get lined up. If it fails to fall in the 'sight' designation due to not having optics - make a name for it and I'll bite.
You do have a point with 7.62mm ammo being longer-range than 5.56, and that neither is designated sniper ammo. regardless, I've hit targets at 250m an up with a long-barrel M16 with no difficulty, and I'm by no means a professional. So an M-16 *can* be used as such a weapon, as can any long-barrel assault rifle, to an extent.
Actually, I toted a Galil (Israeli variant converted to 5.56mm) for 2.5 of my 3 year military service (in Israel).
But hey, what do I know.
An AK47 (or any spinoff thereof) is a lousy sniper weapon. The sight (both default or addon) is located on a somewhat loose and wobbly firing mechanism cover, which is thereby very hard to properly calibrate. An M16 or derivate would serve as a significantly better and longer-range sniper weapon.
.50'
Real cause to worry from long-range sniper fire is when the bad guys get their hands on real sniper weapons, like an M42, or worse, a 'light
Not neccesarily.
I'm not siding with the grandparent's gloom & doom outlook on elevators, just pointing out that elevator-worthy material *might* reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude for conventional rocketry with some conceptual modifications -
chucking a rocket into orbit requires it to have two things -
a. Mass to dispose of (m1v1 + m2v2 = MV)
b. Energy, to be translated into the kinetic energy of the mass being disposed.
Now, let's give conventional launch the same available technology as the entity who is building an earth space elevator has - uberlight material and lasers.
Take something that looks like the shuttle. throw the engine out. Fill the external fuel tank with some other, MUCH LIGHTER stuff (e.g. the *mass*), remembering mass is *not* weight, that need the same characteristics as current propellant - e.g. doesn't explode.
Build the frame from your uberlight material.
Now put a ground laser on it, which will give the shuttle *energy*. enough to heat/accelerate your mass out the back end, and push you up.
I'm not implying this has or can be done, just that "rocket" propulsion *may* be able to drop, no idea how much, if given the same technologies you'd have lying around when you're contemplating starting to build a space elevator.
Until what they create has a brain and is capable of rational thought I don't see where the moral implications of this differ from material science.
Having conquered the chart as the most populistic marvel of stupidity ever to leave the mouth of a NASA official, I have taken immediate action and incorporated it in my sig.
As of yet, no official statement has been received from NASA as to where exactly it is they do wish to go.
A marketing guy and a technical supporter decide to open a bearhide business in Alaska.
.. and nearer .. .. and nearer still...
So they get all prepped up, rent a cabin in the woods...
The marketing guy says "I'll go get us a bear". So, he disappears into the woods. An hour passes, two hours.... three hours... the techie's waiting next to the cabin, but the marketing guy doesn't come back.
After another hour, a sound can be heard coming from the woods... it seems to be getting nearer...
"...aaaaaaa!!..."
"...aaaAAA!!..."
"... AAAAAAARGHAHAAAAAA!!!!"
All of a sudden the marketing guy bursts out of the woods, running, panic stricken, towards the hut's door, a humongous 18-foot grizzly roaring and lumbering not 20 feet behind him, blood and death in its eyes.
He reaches the hut door in the nick of time, moves aside at the last moment, letting the grizzly barge right into the hut.
The tech supporter slams the door behind the grizzly, and properly bars it from the outside.
After catching his breath and exchanging glances with his companion, the marketing guy looks at the tech supporter and says
"All right. You handle him, I'm going to get us another one"
It puts yet another country off-limits for ad-scum, not only to operate from, but even to live there while operating an ad company in zimbabwe.
It's not a silver bullet and shouldn't be treated as such. It won't make adware vanish. But if more and more counties say "NOT ON OUR SOIL" to this (and same goes for anything from child porn, to snuff films, to terrorist camps), it make it harder for said scum to operate (especially when they live in those counties and are subject to being sued). Consider this - some of the people who live in those countries, do this and do not look to relocating will look away from such practice (same as they do from, say, theft), thus such legislation *will* decrease the scale of the problem.
They're correct by looking at it as any other form of crime, assuming that completely killing it is not within our means, but instead looking at mitigating it through legislation.