Who will "fix" the internet and how?
on
Gone Phishing?
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· Score: 1
The rise of phishing just shows how broken the current internet and e-mail system is. In a age in which worms and scammers can gather address books, fake headers, copy websites of legitimate businesses, hijack browsers, create zombies, and log keystrokes, no e-mail (or even web page) can be presumed to be legitimate no matter who it comes from or how you got it.
This problem saddens me greatly because it ruins the promise of global communications. Rather than a utopian information paradise for everyone, we seem to allowing the creation of a back alley in which few dare to tread.
If e-mail and the internet are ever to become truly useful, they must become simply trustworthy (as in simple to trust). Consumers (i.e. non-geeks) must be able to trust incoming emails or email is useless. Consumers must be able to trust webpages and their computers or these tools become useless.
I know that many/. denizens are opposed to draconian tracking and regulation of net activities, but that is what we will get if we don't craft non-invasive, non-governmental solutions to phishing and related scams. How long will it take before the government regulates the net to make it "safe" for online grandmothers and their retirement savings?
I'm sure they'll advertise this one as having a "free mouse pad" like its some grand deal. They'll not tell the buyer that the provided mouse pad is an essential part of the system and not a magnanimous offer on their part. I wonder how many people will try to use this mouse with the pad of their choice, get a few days use and then complain when it dies.
It reminds me of those old Sun optical mice with the metal grid-pattern mouse pads. I always like turning coworkers pads 90 degrees and watching the ensuing hilarity.
It's not about programmers vs non-programmers. It's about the person who created the application vs everyone else. And when it's put like that, there's no choice to make. If software hasn't been designed for other people to use, there's no point releasing it.
Excellent point. I know that I've been guilty of this at various times. It's so easy for a person to fall into the trap of thinking that "what is obvious to me, must be obvious to you." Like you, I too get pissed at bad programming because I know that it could be so much better.
The distinction you make - that usability comes down to a choice between two groups of people who fundamentally differ in technical ability - is not only very wrong, it's actively harmful
Perhaps I do oversimplify, but I think the point is valid. I did not mean to imply that usability perceptions are caused by technical ability, per se.
Instead, different people think differently and that is a much greater challenge, one that is not overcome by training. I know that I love having multiple ways to accomplish the same task but that some other people hate that. I know that I have loved the extreme usability of some pieces of software that failed miserably in the marketplace. I know people who love LISP and others who hate it. I know that I have an engineer's brain, but others do not.
I think we can agree that there are systems that show poor usability regardless of the user -- its easy to make something that is unusable by almost everyone. And I agree 100% with you that software must be designed for use by others (not just by the lone programmer). But the assumption that one can make something usable for everyone is false and damaging because it ignores the very different thinking styles of different users.
Some people love GUIs for the same reason (ease & hand-holding) that others hate them. Some people love CLIs for the same reason (succinct power) that others hate them . Although people like to think there are universal design principles, and there are some, most real world designs require compromises based on the needs and proclivities of a diverse user population.
The challenge for OSS is that its developers tend create the kind of software that they themselves want. It does not have many developers creating software for a non-developing/non-geek user populations. Thus, OSS will invariably create software in its own image. This is not a "bad thing" unless the only true goal is universal adoption of OSS at the expense of OSS geek-usability.
The point: you can't please all of the people all of the time. And given the model underlying OSS, it is unlikely to focus on pleasing non-programmers.
From the article, it sounds like they correct for this in software. You'd need to calibrate the firmware specially for each new display, but it's doable and can be automated
I hope so, but don't see how it can work. The problem is getting a seamless image between the part of the image that bounces N times inside the wedge before exting versus the one that bounces N+1 times. The upper edge of the light that bounces N times inside the wedge before exiting to the screen must magically fall adjacent to the lower edge of the band of light that bounces N+1 times before exiting. Nonflat surfaces cause divergence of these beams and lead to either gaps across the image or overlapping scan lines. Although one could resample/render the image to handle overlapping scanlines, the image would be unavoidably fuzzy in the overlap region. Worse, thermal distortion and aging of the plastic wedge means that the "calibration" would be time-varying.
The point is that the gap-inducing distortion is in the physics of the optical system. Without a projector that controls the direction of the beam from each pixel (not just the intensity of the beam), the system is in trouble. To my knowledge, they don't have a projector with calibrated beam steering.
Given the nasty realities of thermal efficiencies, I doubt this thing can be more that 33% efficient. That means that the device will run 3 times warmer than current battery-operated versions. Given the behavior of most modern-day laptops, that will be far too hot.
Of course, the invention will work very well with better designed hardware and software. Anyone who thinks they need more than 500 MHz processor for most applications (and more than 50 MHz for basic office applications) is either playing games or using bloatware.
It sounds as if these folks think they know how to manufacture these displays, but have not actually done so yet. I predict they will discover that injection molding cannot create the large optically flat surfaces they need to create an undistorted image. Differences in the solidification time across the wedge will distort the shape of the surfaces and distort the images. Any differences in the temperature across the injected flow of resin will create internal ripples in the wedge. I also wonder if they have a way of controlling thermal distortions during use where the back of the wedge is warmer than the front and thus causes the wedge to curl.
Invention is easy. Manufacturing in high quantity, high quality, low price is the actual hard part. And undercutting the deflating price-performance curve of other well-established competing technologies is even harder. That said, I do wish them luck.
Gert Mittring was disqualified when judges noted a small sticker on his chest in a post-event checkup. It was discovered that he had Intel Inside.
The news set off a legal feeding frenzy. SCO sued Mr. Mittring for using the company's super secret 13th root finder source code. Microsoft then added to the man's woes by suing for patent infringement over Microsoft's patents on 100 digit numbers. RIAA then sued him for including "8675309" in the answer -- obviously a stolen clip from "Jenny" by Tommy Tutone.
I think this issue depends on one's emotion state as much as the "work" load. I've been extremely productive on some fun, challenging assignments that made me want to spend every waking moment thinking about the problem. But if the problem (or associated people) are unpleasant/unworthy, then productivity goes to crap in no time. I think some of this is related to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow" (an introduction to the idea) in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Lithium ion batteries, so popular for their power density, are inherently unstable if they are overcharged or become too hot (about 140 F is the threshold). As a spokesperson for one battery maker said "When you heat this material up, it (can) reach an onset temperature that begins to self-heat and progresses into fire and explosion." One battery company claims to make a "safe" battery that uses phosphates, not cobalt oxides in its lithium ion. They even have a video demonstration that we can slashdot.
If one can discover how the printer ID number is encrypted and added into the image, then one could add a second, third, fourth, etc. number to each image sent to the printer. It might make the image look slightly noisier, but it will make it hard to recover or disambiguate the printer's actual number. At worst, it increases the labor of the authorities who don;t know which number is the "real" number. At best, it obscures the printer's ID and makes it hard to recover any ID number from the image.
The glitch in the machines recorded straight Democratic Party votes for Libertarians.
This sounds like the core software was fine, only the configuration file for that election was erroneous. No amount of OSS on the platform level can catch the problem of misuse/errors at the election level. Even a paper receipt, scantron, punch card, etc. is no guarantee for forestalling this type of mistake. It's too easy for someone or something to misinterpret a mark on paper or in a computer file because of a miscommunication in the format, layout, or semantics of the ballot.
Both 'pedias can suffer from bias and distortions that are based on the opinions and prevailing cultures of the authors. Wiki follows the whims and fads of the editing/contributing public and Britannica follows the whims of the academic elite. On the one hand, if enough an idea is "popular" and repeated enough, it becomes truth in a Wiki, regardless of the evidence to the contrary and regardless of the pedigree of that assessment. On the other hand, Britannica's funneling process means that the opinions of gatekeepers trump any dissent.
Neither approach is right or wrong. The Wiki approach provides too much power to mediocrity. The Britannica approach provides too much power to an academic elite.
Coming in a packet near you, from the EULA of the future:
By connecting a computer to the internet, you hereby agree to the terms of this agreement (hereafter referred to as "deal with the devil") for this software (hereafter referred to as "CPU sucking nightmare")......
Won't surprise me if virus/trojan/worm/spyware writers use IP law against those that would hope to rid the world of their menace.
As a veteran time-shifter, I can only hope (but not hold my breath) that this service might convince broadcasters not to set aggressive limits on shifted viewing of "prime-time" shows. Once the media moguls understand that many viewers don't live life in 30-minute slots, they may be less likely to prevent time-shifting. On the other hand, I tend to time shift by weeks or months and I could see broadcasters setting the system to limit viewing to when 99% of viewers are watching with recording expiry times of only a few days.
Perhaps its time to stockup on pre-broadcast flag equipment.
I think the issue here is the difference between business and consumer software. Business software has an opportunity for revenues (and some profits) from customization, support, application service provider, and management services. I don't see much money in the consumer side of the equation -- most consumers won't pay the $50 it takes to keep a qualified tech support person employed. Moreover, well-designed consumer software needs no support, customization, etc. And since much of the open source community is NOT joe-six-pack consumer-oriented, the move to business open source is sensible.
As more businesses look to open source, the market for consulting/implementation/customization/support/ma intenance will grow. Those OSS companies that establish a lead in providing competent business software support will pay back those VC dollars.
It would be easy for Google to insert a small fraction of non-sequiturs in the results, look at Microsoft's search results, and then sue for misuse. Even if MSFT uses random proxies to avoid detection, it cannot manually recheck all the hits to make sure they are correct (if they could, they had the resources to check all the sites, then they not need to crawl Google. A few made-up sites or inappropriate search hits would be enough to establish a pattern of abuse.
The sailboat analogy is deeply flawed because sailboats can sail up wind by transferring momentum from the wind to the water. Lift generated by the keel acts in combination with lift generated by the sail to create a net forward force even as the sailboat moves upwind. A solar sail has no equivalent second fluid to act against in order to move upwind. But a solar sail can move "upwind" by deorbiting.
For a mirrored sail, the force acts perpendicular to the sail surface. By canting the sail in the right direction (angling it to reflect sunlight forward), the force on the sail can act to deorbit the satellite. Thus, a solar satellite does not tack in the sailboat sense, but uses the suns energy to drop into an orbit closer to the sun.
Well, if there's a competent psychic predator out there, what evidence would you expect?
Evidence of absence is not absence of evidence.
You allude to an important counterargument here. What if some predator evolved psychic powers. Why couldn't the prey evolve countermeasures. Perhaps encrypted/scrambled neural energies might confuse a predator, a psychic blast might stun the predator, or a psychic damping field might suppress local telekinetic abilities. Of course, if an evolutionary psychic power arms race were to occur, then biologists would see evidence of that. Strange hyper-developed organs or specialized tissues would leave scientists scratching their heads until they discovered that animals with bigger mystery organs could read minds and animals that lacked the organs became easy prey.
The point is that evolution has had a very long time to uncover what can be done with carbon-based life and electrochemical systems. Were psychic powers possible, it seems unlikely that they would only appear in people and only appear at such a tenuous level that repeatable studies are hard to do. Psychic powers confer a strong evolutionary advantage and evolution is very very good at amplifying any advantage. Were it possible, it should be much more widespread and much more obvious.
Nope, I didn't see anything either.
On the other-hand (with tinfoil hat on head), perhaps our psychic overlords don't want us to be aware of psychic powers. Any human that seems to show psychic abilities becomes tormented and marginalized until the mainstream ignores them and their evidence.
Actually, as I understand it, spiders have fast nerve signaling - fast enough that their reactions are faster than your perception, so they look prescient.
Very good point, many creatures do have "super-human" senses. The spider nerves are a great quantitative tweak on neuronal engineering - bigger diameter axons carry signals faster and the small size of spiders means the latencies are extremely low.
Other creatures have abilities that seem near-psychic but are not when you study the creature further. Cockroaches have sensitive hairs on their tails that pick up the air pressure wave that precedes any subsonic moving object. Because the pressure wave travels at about 700 miles per hour (the speed of sound), the cockroach feels the swatter approaching long before it reaches the roach. As a double advantage the hairs are wired directly to the legs so the roach flees the instant something starts moving its way without "thinking."
Flies have a 3-stage pipelined visual system that operates a 400 Hz (compared to human's 60 Hz system). They see the swatter and react more quickly than the human eye.
Electric fish use an active electric field to map their surroundings in muddy water. Dolphins and bats use ultrasound. Mantis shrimp see 6 color bands and 4 polarizations. Pit vipers see far IR. Etc. All of these amazing examples rely on well know physics to let the animal sense what a human cannot.
Geez, don't you ever get out to the movies?
Unfortunately no!;) I see most of my movies on the airplane. But I do find that reality is often much stranger than fiction, that scientists discover stuff that is more outrageous that anything Hollywood can dream up.
If telekinesis, ESP, etc. were biologically possible, it would have been evolved by some creatures already. Imagine the incredible advantage a predator would have if it could read the mind of the prey and know that the prey was hiding behind a tree or that the prey was about to jog to the right or left. Or what if a predator (or prey) could telekinetically cause a stick to trip its opponent. Yet, no animal (or plant) seems to have such powers.
It is unlikely that humanity is unique in have some never-before evolved power. The more scientists study animals, the more they find that humans are not qualitatively different from other creatures, only quantitatively different. Other creatures can count, create tools, have emotions, participate in social structures, practice deception, be aware of what others might think or do, etc. We exhibit these properties to a greater degree than do animals, but we are not unique. (In fact if humans did have psychic power, they would have little need for social systems, tools, etc. because psychic power would let them snare prey/beings with lesser powers.)
Finally, we find no "physical" basis for psychic power. The four forces of gravity, eletromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force do not provide a basis for psychic power. It is unlikely that some magic biologically created material could manifest and manipulate some unknown fifth force without either biologists, chemists, or physicists becoming aware of it..
This system is guaranteed to be dangerous if the micromirrors stop moving. Consider a system that paints 1000x1000 array of dots on the retina with a normal brightness. If one axis locks up, the system will paint a line of line 1000 times brightness than normal. And if Both X and Y axes lock up, then the laser will paint a spot 1,000,000 times brighter than normal.
Even if this is functioning normally, it could still cause damage due to the intensity of the scanning spot, regardless of the ultra-short duration of the spot. When it comes to photochemical reactions, the effects are not invariant with the product of duration and intensity -- a short burst of intense light causes more reaction than a much longer and lower intensity exposure. In photographic film, this is called reciprocity failure. It is also why museums prohibit flash photography (the short, intense burst of light does much more damage than does a steady low-intensity light source).
This machine isn't Sun's first x86 machine. The 386i was an early attempt by Sun to use a cheap Intel processor to make a lower-price Unix machine. All of this was before Sun abandoned 3rd-party processors (Motorola and Intel) to concentrate on the SPARC architecture.
Overuse of this technology will result in repetitive and boring prose. Yes, well-written prose does have some redundancy/predictability -- it helps the reader stay on track, reinforces key points, reminds the reader, etc. This technology will help some writers create more consistent text. Yet I fear that too many will rely too much on this crutch.
The problem is that the best prose contains unexpected novelty such as a plot twists, new facets of a character, joke punch lines, etc. In a true "page-turner" the reader can't predict what will happen next. This novelty (appropriate for a good "novel") is the opposite of what this technology offers.
Hydrocarbon-rich atmospheres bring the possibility of fuel-breathing jet engines. With a tank of oxygen or other oxidizer, a craft could scoop the fuel from the "air" and fly or run a powerplant.
Slashdot Mirror
The rise of phishing just shows how broken the current internet and e-mail system is. In a age in which worms and scammers can gather address books, fake headers, copy websites of legitimate businesses, hijack browsers, create zombies, and log keystrokes, no e-mail (or even web page) can be presumed to be legitimate no matter who it comes from or how you got it.
/. denizens are opposed to draconian tracking and regulation of net activities, but that is what we will get if we don't craft non-invasive, non-governmental solutions to phishing and related scams. How long will it take before the government regulates the net to make it "safe" for online grandmothers and their retirement savings?
This problem saddens me greatly because it ruins the promise of global communications. Rather than a utopian information paradise for everyone, we seem to allowing the creation of a back alley in which few dare to tread.
If e-mail and the internet are ever to become truly useful, they must become simply trustworthy (as in simple to trust). Consumers (i.e. non-geeks) must be able to trust incoming emails or email is useless. Consumers must be able to trust webpages and their computers or these tools become useless.
I know that many
I'm sure they'll advertise this one as having a "free mouse pad" like its some grand deal. They'll not tell the buyer that the provided mouse pad is an essential part of the system and not a magnanimous offer on their part. I wonder how many people will try to use this mouse with the pad of their choice, get a few days use and then complain when it dies.
It reminds me of those old Sun optical mice with the metal grid-pattern mouse pads. I always like turning coworkers pads 90 degrees and watching the ensuing hilarity.
It's not about programmers vs non-programmers. It's about the person who created the application vs everyone else. And when it's put like that, there's no choice to make. If software hasn't been designed for other people to use, there's no point releasing it.
Excellent point. I know that I've been guilty of this at various times. It's so easy for a person to fall into the trap of thinking that "what is obvious to me, must be obvious to you." Like you, I too get pissed at bad programming because I know that it could be so much better.
The distinction you make - that usability comes down to a choice between two groups of people who fundamentally differ in technical ability - is not only very wrong, it's actively harmful
Perhaps I do oversimplify, but I think the point is valid. I did not mean to imply that usability perceptions are caused by technical ability, per se.
Instead, different people think differently and that is a much greater challenge, one that is not overcome by training. I know that I love having multiple ways to accomplish the same task but that some other people hate that. I know that I have loved the extreme usability of some pieces of software that failed miserably in the marketplace. I know people who love LISP and others who hate it. I know that I have an engineer's brain, but others do not.
I think we can agree that there are systems that show poor usability regardless of the user -- its easy to make something that is unusable by almost everyone. And I agree 100% with you that software must be designed for use by others (not just by the lone programmer). But the assumption that one can make something usable for everyone is false and damaging because it ignores the very different thinking styles of different users.
Some people love GUIs for the same reason (ease & hand-holding) that others hate them. Some people love CLIs for the same reason (succinct power) that others hate them . Although people like to think there are universal design principles, and there are some, most real world designs require compromises based on the needs and proclivities of a diverse user population.
The challenge for OSS is that its developers tend create the kind of software that they themselves want. It does not have many developers creating software for a non-developing/non-geek user populations. Thus, OSS will invariably create software in its own image. This is not a "bad thing" unless the only true goal is universal adoption of OSS at the expense of OSS geek-usability.
The point: you can't please all of the people all of the time. And given the model underlying OSS, it is unlikely to focus on pleasing non-programmers.
From the article, it sounds like they correct for this in software. You'd need to calibrate the firmware specially for each new display, but it's doable and can be automated
I hope so, but don't see how it can work. The problem is getting a seamless image between the part of the image that bounces N times inside the wedge before exting versus the one that bounces N+1 times. The upper edge of the light that bounces N times inside the wedge before exiting to the screen must magically fall adjacent to the lower edge of the band of light that bounces N+1 times before exiting. Nonflat surfaces cause divergence of these beams and lead to either gaps across the image or overlapping scan lines. Although one could resample/render the image to handle overlapping scanlines, the image would be unavoidably fuzzy in the overlap region. Worse, thermal distortion and aging of the plastic wedge means that the "calibration" would be time-varying.
The point is that the gap-inducing distortion is in the physics of the optical system. Without a projector that controls the direction of the beam from each pixel (not just the intensity of the beam), the system is in trouble. To my knowledge, they don't have a projector with calibrated beam steering.
Given the nasty realities of thermal efficiencies, I doubt this thing can be more that 33% efficient. That means that the device will run 3 times warmer than current battery-operated versions. Given the behavior of most modern-day laptops, that will be far too hot.
Of course, the invention will work very well with better designed hardware and software. Anyone who thinks they need more than 500 MHz processor for most applications (and more than 50 MHz for basic office applications) is either playing games or using bloatware.
It sounds as if these folks think they know how to manufacture these displays, but have not actually done so yet. I predict they will discover that injection molding cannot create the large optically flat surfaces they need to create an undistorted image. Differences in the solidification time across the wedge will distort the shape of the surfaces and distort the images. Any differences in the temperature across the injected flow of resin will create internal ripples in the wedge. I also wonder if they have a way of controlling thermal distortions during use where the back of the wedge is warmer than the front and thus causes the wedge to curl.
Invention is easy. Manufacturing in high quantity, high quality, low price is the actual hard part. And undercutting the deflating price-performance curve of other well-established competing technologies is even harder. That said, I do wish them luck.
Gert Mittring was disqualified when judges noted a small sticker on his chest in a post-event checkup. It was discovered that he had Intel Inside.
The news set off a legal feeding frenzy. SCO sued Mr. Mittring for using the company's super secret 13th root finder source code. Microsoft then added to the man's woes by suing for patent infringement over Microsoft's patents on 100 digit numbers. RIAA then sued him for including "8675309" in the answer -- obviously a stolen clip from "Jenny" by Tommy Tutone.
I think this issue depends on one's emotion state as much as the "work" load. I've been extremely productive on some fun, challenging assignments that made me want to spend every waking moment thinking about the problem. But if the problem (or associated people) are unpleasant/unworthy, then productivity goes to crap in no time. I think some of this is related to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow" (an introduction to the idea) in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Lithium ion batteries, so popular for their power density, are inherently unstable if they are overcharged or become too hot (about 140 F is the threshold). As a spokesperson for one battery maker said "When you heat this material up, it (can) reach an onset temperature that begins to self-heat and progresses into fire and explosion." One battery company claims to make a "safe" battery that uses phosphates, not cobalt oxides in its lithium ion. They even have a video demonstration that we can slashdot.
If one can discover how the printer ID number is encrypted and added into the image, then one could add a second, third, fourth, etc. number to each image sent to the printer. It might make the image look slightly noisier, but it will make it hard to recover or disambiguate the printer's actual number. At worst, it increases the labor of the authorities who don;t know which number is the "real" number. At best, it obscures the printer's ID and makes it hard to recover any ID number from the image.
The glitch in the machines recorded straight Democratic Party votes for Libertarians.
This sounds like the core software was fine, only the configuration file for that election was erroneous. No amount of OSS on the platform level can catch the problem of misuse/errors at the election level. Even a paper receipt, scantron, punch card, etc. is no guarantee for forestalling this type of mistake. It's too easy for someone or something to misinterpret a mark on paper or in a computer file because of a miscommunication in the format, layout, or semantics of the ballot.
Both 'pedias can suffer from bias and distortions that are based on the opinions and prevailing cultures of the authors. Wiki follows the whims and fads of the editing/contributing public and Britannica follows the whims of the academic elite. On the one hand, if enough an idea is "popular" and repeated enough, it becomes truth in a Wiki, regardless of the evidence to the contrary and regardless of the pedigree of that assessment. On the other hand, Britannica's funneling process means that the opinions of gatekeepers trump any dissent.
Neither approach is right or wrong. The Wiki approach provides too much power to mediocrity. The Britannica approach provides too much power to an academic elite.
Coming in a packet near you, from the EULA of the future:
......
By connecting a computer to the internet, you hereby agree to the terms of this agreement (hereafter referred to as "deal with the devil") for this software (hereafter referred to as "CPU sucking nightmare")
Won't surprise me if virus/trojan/worm/spyware writers use IP law against those that would hope to rid the world of their menace.
As a veteran time-shifter, I can only hope (but not hold my breath) that this service might convince broadcasters not to set aggressive limits on shifted viewing of "prime-time" shows. Once the media moguls understand that many viewers don't live life in 30-minute slots, they may be less likely to prevent time-shifting. On the other hand, I tend to time shift by weeks or months and I could see broadcasters setting the system to limit viewing to when 99% of viewers are watching with recording expiry times of only a few days.
Perhaps its time to stockup on pre-broadcast flag equipment.
I think the issue here is the difference between business and consumer software. Business software has an opportunity for revenues (and some profits) from customization, support, application service provider, and management services. I don't see much money in the consumer side of the equation -- most consumers won't pay the $50 it takes to keep a qualified tech support person employed. Moreover, well-designed consumer software needs no support, customization, etc. And since much of the open source community is NOT joe-six-pack consumer-oriented, the move to business open source is sensible.
a intenance will grow. Those OSS companies that establish a lead in providing competent business software support will pay back those VC dollars.
As more businesses look to open source, the market for consulting/implementation/customization/support/m
It would be easy for Google to insert a small fraction of non-sequiturs in the results, look at Microsoft's search results, and then sue for misuse. Even if MSFT uses random proxies to avoid detection, it cannot manually recheck all the hits to make sure they are correct (if they could, they had the resources to check all the sites, then they not need to crawl Google. A few made-up sites or inappropriate search hits would be enough to establish a pattern of abuse.
The sailboat analogy is deeply flawed because sailboats can sail up wind by transferring momentum from the wind to the water. Lift generated by the keel acts in combination with lift generated by the sail to create a net forward force even as the sailboat moves upwind. A solar sail has no equivalent second fluid to act against in order to move upwind. But a solar sail can move "upwind" by deorbiting.
For a mirrored sail, the force acts perpendicular to the sail surface. By canting the sail in the right direction (angling it to reflect sunlight forward), the force on the sail can act to deorbit the satellite. Thus, a solar satellite does not tack in the sailboat sense, but uses the suns energy to drop into an orbit closer to the sun.
Well, if there's a competent psychic predator out there, what evidence would you expect?
Evidence of absence is not absence of evidence.
You allude to an important counterargument here. What if some predator evolved psychic powers. Why couldn't the prey evolve countermeasures. Perhaps encrypted/scrambled neural energies might confuse a predator, a psychic blast might stun the predator, or a psychic damping field might suppress local telekinetic abilities. Of course, if an evolutionary psychic power arms race were to occur, then biologists would see evidence of that. Strange hyper-developed organs or specialized tissues would leave scientists scratching their heads until they discovered that animals with bigger mystery organs could read minds and animals that lacked the organs became easy prey.
The point is that evolution has had a very long time to uncover what can be done with carbon-based life and electrochemical systems. Were psychic powers possible, it seems unlikely that they would only appear in people and only appear at such a tenuous level that repeatable studies are hard to do. Psychic powers confer a strong evolutionary advantage and evolution is very very good at amplifying any advantage. Were it possible, it should be much more widespread and much more obvious.
Nope, I didn't see anything either.
On the other-hand (with tinfoil hat on head), perhaps our psychic overlords don't want us to be aware of psychic powers. Any human that seems to show psychic abilities becomes tormented and marginalized until the mainstream ignores them and their evidence.
We shall see.... Or perhaps we won't........
Actually, as I understand it, spiders have fast nerve signaling - fast enough that their reactions are faster than your perception, so they look prescient.
;) I see most of my movies on the airplane. But I do find that reality is often much stranger than fiction, that scientists discover stuff that is more outrageous that anything Hollywood can dream up.
Very good point, many creatures do have "super-human" senses. The spider nerves are a great quantitative tweak on neuronal engineering - bigger diameter axons carry signals faster and the small size of spiders means the latencies are extremely low.
Other creatures have abilities that seem near-psychic but are not when you study the creature further. Cockroaches have sensitive hairs on their tails that pick up the air pressure wave that precedes any subsonic moving object. Because the pressure wave travels at about 700 miles per hour (the speed of sound), the cockroach feels the swatter approaching long before it reaches the roach. As a double advantage the hairs are wired directly to the legs so the roach flees the instant something starts moving its way without "thinking."
Flies have a 3-stage pipelined visual system that operates a 400 Hz (compared to human's 60 Hz system). They see the swatter and react more quickly than the human eye.
Electric fish use an active electric field to map their surroundings in muddy water. Dolphins and bats use ultrasound. Mantis shrimp see 6 color bands and 4 polarizations. Pit vipers see far IR. Etc. All of these amazing examples rely on well know physics to let the animal sense what a human cannot.
Geez, don't you ever get out to the movies?
Unfortunately no!
If telekinesis, ESP, etc. were biologically possible, it would have been evolved by some creatures already. Imagine the incredible advantage a predator would have if it could read the mind of the prey and know that the prey was hiding behind a tree or that the prey was about to jog to the right or left. Or what if a predator (or prey) could telekinetically cause a stick to trip its opponent. Yet, no animal (or plant) seems to have such powers.
It is unlikely that humanity is unique in have some never-before evolved power. The more scientists study animals, the more they find that humans are not qualitatively different from other creatures, only quantitatively different. Other creatures can count, create tools, have emotions, participate in social structures, practice deception, be aware of what others might think or do, etc. We exhibit these properties to a greater degree than do animals, but we are not unique. (In fact if humans did have psychic power, they would have little need for social systems, tools, etc. because psychic power would let them snare prey/beings with lesser powers.)
Finally, we find no "physical" basis for psychic power. The four forces of gravity, eletromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force do not provide a basis for psychic power. It is unlikely that some magic biologically created material could manifest and manipulate some unknown fifth force without either biologists, chemists, or physicists becoming aware of it..
This system is guaranteed to be dangerous if the micromirrors stop moving. Consider a system that paints 1000x1000 array of dots on the retina with a normal brightness. If one axis locks up, the system will paint a line of line 1000 times brightness than normal. And if Both X and Y axes lock up, then the laser will paint a spot 1,000,000 times brighter than normal.
Even if this is functioning normally, it could still cause damage due to the intensity of the scanning spot, regardless of the ultra-short duration of the spot. When it comes to photochemical reactions, the effects are not invariant with the product of duration and intensity -- a short burst of intense light causes more reaction than a much longer and lower intensity exposure. In photographic film, this is called reciprocity failure. It is also why museums prohibit flash photography (the short, intense burst of light does much more damage than does a steady low-intensity light source).
This machine isn't Sun's first x86 machine. The 386i was an early attempt by Sun to use a cheap Intel processor to make a lower-price Unix machine. All of this was before Sun abandoned 3rd-party processors (Motorola and Intel) to concentrate on the SPARC architecture.
Overuse of this technology will result in repetitive and boring prose. Yes, well-written prose does have some redundancy/predictability -- it helps the reader stay on track, reinforces key points, reminds the reader, etc. This technology will help some writers create more consistent text. Yet I fear that too many will rely too much on this crutch.
The problem is that the best prose contains unexpected novelty such as a plot twists, new facets of a character, joke punch lines, etc. In a true "page-turner" the reader can't predict what will happen next. This novelty (appropriate for a good "novel") is the opposite of what this technology offers.
Hydrocarbon-rich atmospheres bring the possibility of fuel-breathing jet engines. With a tank of oxygen or other oxidizer, a craft could scoop the fuel from the "air" and fly or run a powerplant.