Re:Of course, by the time we build any such things
on
NPR Talks Skyhooks
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· Score: 0, Redundant
A space elevator is not really that hard to make once you have the cable material sussed. And if you can work out some way to make descending cars power the ascending ones then it is also quite energy efficient as well.
Compare that to gravity manipulation: there's no solid evidence that it is even possible, at least at any scale likely to be useful, and even if it is it is likely to consume astronomical amounts of energy to get anything sizable up the gravity well.
If I recall reading this correctly artwork on professionally developed games is as or more expensive than the programming. Significantly more expensive in many cases - game programming teams are often not that big for various reasons and they tend to be outnumbered significantly by the artists, level designers and other content creators.
This is actually one of the biggest problems facing OSS games: finding capable, experienced coders to produce engines on the cheap is usually not that hard but finding good quality artists and musicians willing to produce significant quantities of professional-level artwork and music for nothing or nearly nothing is virtually impossible.
Then, basically, you'd be able to patent something now which cannot possibly be produced until the future, then act like you're making steps towards it? Yup. this one for example - sony patenting a technology that they themselves admit is just IP grabbing: "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."
Hardware may be cheap, but it is still controlled and largely closed. So you may be able to go out and pick up a piece of hardware that you can be fairly confident an OSS OS will run on now to some degree, can you be be sure you will be able to do the same in 5 years, 10 years?
Software is only part of the equation, without the hardware it is nothing.
I'm trying to remember where I'm not allowed to reimplement other people's ideas to begin with, though.
Ah, you must have missed that memo. It's the one that says that, once you implement one version of an idea, you own all possible implementations of it. It's the same one that said software patents are a great idea, "Intellectual Property" really exists and something about AYBABTUSC.
Is there some property of US phones that makes them flakey or something? I ask this in all seriousness - here in the UK, the only time I lose signal on my mobile is when there's a hill in the way of the tower or I'm outside the network's coverage (which, given that it's Orange, is pretty hard to do). And our buildings here are almost exclusively brick, stone or concrete and metal.
In the last 2-3 wars Americans have bombed pretty much all of their allies by accident.
For some reason I doubt that the addition of augmented reality systems in a limited set of coordination situations is going to do very much to prevent pilots blowing up the wrong things or stop trigger-happy troops that appear incapable of determining who is on their side from making a complete arse of things.
It is true - even if you play offline, the offline token is set to expire after a certain amount of time. Once it expires, you need to reconnect and reauthenticate before you can play the game again.
You'd think so. With the right equipment you can detect where the axle is to within factions of a degree and, from what, calculate how many revs the axle has made and then work out how much land coverage that translates to.
But I'd suggest trying it out some time with a simple robot across various surfaces - you'll fnd it isn't easy or more accurate. It relies on the assumptions that the diameters of the wheels are constant (they could change as they wear or pick up/shed debris) and that 1 revolution of a wheel always corresponds to a given distance moved (which it may not depending on the terrain, traction level, turn method and more). Unless you have mechanisms in place to deal with these - and doing so is not easy - working out where you are based on axle revs can become inaccurate very quickly.
So tell me again how passports are going to help? Define help. What it will do is keep people scared: "They wouldn't be requiring it if there wasn't a real threat!!! OHNOESWEREDOOMED!!!11eleventy!!"
The vast majority of people do not think that sort of thing through, they aren't going to see how utterly pointless it is, they're just goign to see that it is being done and - with help from the media - jump to the wrong conclusion.
It won't help anyone except those who want to keep the population in a state where they don't actually think.
Okay, I'll bite. Now this is going to sound a dumb question, but I am serious and I want a serious answer.
How, exactly, does any DRM system ever ensure that "it's the publics right being protected more than the copyright holder", given that the entire point of DRM is to prevent the public from using material in any way other than those dictated by the copyright holder?
I can't take credit for it - I just googled for it as I've seen it in quite a few places on the net along with a similar one for "Your post advocates a... solution to improving password security".
0. Shoot the idiots who actually buy things from spammers.
If there was no market, it wouldn't be done. Remove the morons that fall for it and not only does it make spamming less profitable, the gene pool gets a little cleaner and you go a long way to solving the overpopulation problem.
As requested (all selections open to change, subjective, etc, etc) Note the law-based stuff comes from the fact that I suspect a retaliation response like this is probably illegal, IANAL though so this may be/probably is wrong.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (x) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (x) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
and it's part of the reason why I don't find FPS games that great as the depth is lacking (yes, *even* *in* *Halflife* ) Interestingly, if you read some of the inverviews done during the development of HL2 or 'HL2: Raising the bar", you'll run into several situations where they claim to have cut quite significant amounts of story out "to keep the game going". Much of the work was done (or so they say, I'm not sure I trust Valve's word anymore) but some parts, like Kleiner's lab, were "dragging on" so they were cut down.
Faced with the choice between expanding and fleshing out the world they had created, actually giving the player a decent idea of what was really going on and what had happened since HL1, or shoving the next player into another firefight against ill-defined foes they just reached for the plotcutters.
It's not that story and effort to create plot have been forgotten, it's that they don't even seem to be valued anymore. When it comes to a choice between doing something deep, thought-provoking and interesting or mindless crap that sells by the bucketload the moron option always seems to come out on top now.
Slashdot Mirror
A space elevator is not really that hard to make once you have the cable material sussed. And if you can work out some way to make descending cars power the ascending ones then it is also quite energy efficient as well.
Compare that to gravity manipulation: there's no solid evidence that it is even possible, at least at any scale likely to be useful, and even if it is it is likely to consume astronomical amounts of energy to get anything sizable up the gravity well.
If I recall reading this correctly artwork on professionally developed games is as or more expensive than the programming.
Significantly more expensive in many cases - game programming teams are often not that big for various reasons and they tend to be outnumbered significantly by the artists, level designers and other content creators.
This is actually one of the biggest problems facing OSS games: finding capable, experienced coders to produce engines on the cheap is usually not that hard but finding good quality artists and musicians willing to produce significant quantities of professional-level artwork and music for nothing or nearly nothing is virtually impossible.
Then, basically, you'd be able to patent something now which cannot possibly be produced until the future, then act like you're making steps towards it?
Yup. this one for example - sony patenting a technology that they themselves admit is just IP grabbing: "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."
I would find it funny if it didn't nauseate me.
Hardware may be cheap, but it is still controlled and largely closed. So you may be able to go out and pick up a piece of hardware that you can be fairly confident an OSS OS will run on now to some degree, can you be be sure you will be able to do the same in 5 years, 10 years?
Software is only part of the equation, without the hardware it is nothing.
Obviously the lab assistant. Do you have any idea how nasty they can get if you leave chemicals out on the bench?
And this is different from the normal how exactly?
Quite frankly, I'd rather have them arguing - when OSS developers disagree it often highlights issues that people should really be thinking about.
You might like the Solid Wall Of Unity approach but give me chaos any day.
Like he said, best news service coming out of America. At least they admit making the stories up...
I'm trying to remember where I'm not allowed to reimplement other people's ideas to begin with, though.
Ah, you must have missed that memo. It's the one that says that, once you implement one version of an idea, you own all possible implementations of it. It's the same one that said software patents are a great idea, "Intellectual Property" really exists and something about AYBABTUSC.
I'm trying to work out whether you're being serious (which is fine) or making a very clever pun on enlightening WRT monitors...
Sure, no problem: 127.0.0.1
Hah, see you hack that, I dare you!
Is there some property of US phones that makes them flakey or something? I ask this in all seriousness - here in the UK, the only time I lose signal on my mobile is when there's a hill in the way of the tower or I'm outside the network's coverage (which, given that it's Orange, is pretty hard to do). And our buildings here are almost exclusively brick, stone or concrete and metal.
In the last 2-3 wars Americans have bombed pretty much all of their allies by accident.
For some reason I doubt that the addition of augmented reality systems in a limited set of coordination situations is going to do very much to prevent pilots blowing up the wrong things or stop trigger-happy troops that appear incapable of determining who is on their side from making a complete arse of things.
No, it's rocket testing: the idea is that, if they can lift slashdotters up there, they can lift anything...
Yet.
Give them chance.
... welcome our new camel-riding robotic.. oh, nevermind.
It is true - even if you play offline, the offline token is set to expire after a certain amount of time. Once it expires, you need to reconnect and reauthenticate before you can play the game again.
You'd think so. With the right equipment you can detect where the axle is to within factions of a degree and, from what, calculate how many revs the axle has made and then work out how much land coverage that translates to.
But I'd suggest trying it out some time with a simple robot across various surfaces - you'll fnd it isn't easy or more accurate. It relies on the assumptions that the diameters of the wheels are constant (they could change as they wear or pick up/shed debris) and that 1 revolution of a wheel always corresponds to a given distance moved (which it may not depending on the terrain, traction level, turn method and more). Unless you have mechanisms in place to deal with these - and doing so is not easy - working out where you are based on axle revs can become inaccurate very quickly.
So tell me again how passports are going to help?
Define help. What it will do is keep people scared: "They wouldn't be requiring it if there wasn't a real threat!!! OHNOESWEREDOOMED!!!11eleventy!!"
The vast majority of people do not think that sort of thing through, they aren't going to see how utterly pointless it is, they're just goign to see that it is being done and - with help from the media - jump to the wrong conclusion.
It won't help anyone except those who want to keep the population in a state where they don't actually think.
Oh for a "Too damn accurate by half" moderation option :/
Better than that, it's a tautology as well...
Okay, I'll bite. Now this is going to sound a dumb question, but I am serious and I want a serious answer.
How, exactly, does any DRM system ever ensure that "it's the publics right being protected more than the copyright holder", given that the entire point of DRM is to prevent the public from using material in any way other than those dictated by the copyright holder?
I can't take credit for it - I just googled for it as I've seen it in quite a few places on the net along with a similar one for "Your post advocates a ... solution to improving password security".
0. Shoot the idiots who actually buy things from spammers.
If there was no market, it wouldn't be done. Remove the morons that fall for it and not only does it make spamming less profitable, the gene pool gets a little cleaner and you go a long way to solving the overpopulation problem.
As requested (all selections open to change, subjective, etc, etc) Note the law-based stuff comes from the fact that I suspect a retaliation response like this is probably illegal, IANAL though so this may be/probably is wrong.
Your company advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
and it's part of the reason why I don't find FPS games that great as the depth is lacking (yes, *even* *in* *Halflife* )
Interestingly, if you read some of the inverviews done during the development of HL2 or 'HL2: Raising the bar", you'll run into several situations where they claim to have cut quite significant amounts of story out "to keep the game going". Much of the work was done (or so they say, I'm not sure I trust Valve's word anymore) but some parts, like Kleiner's lab, were "dragging on" so they were cut down.
Faced with the choice between expanding and fleshing out the world they had created, actually giving the player a decent idea of what was really going on and what had happened since HL1, or shoving the next player into another firefight against ill-defined foes they just reached for the plotcutters.
It's not that story and effort to create plot have been forgotten, it's that they don't even seem to be valued anymore. When it comes to a choice between doing something deep, thought-provoking and interesting or mindless crap that sells by the bucketload the moron option always seems to come out on top now.