Seems like transportation and its efficiency and costs directly impact lifestyle and societal structures. Now here is a lifestyle amish.net that is not impacted by high fuel costs. Grass for the horses, sweat and elbow grease for the humans. Basic input= food. Basic output= life. Suburbs and Exurbs, large urban areas, Freeways, etc. are all derived from the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act . We get what we pay for- tax dollars that created a system of life that made us dependent on a limited source of fuel. Thanks, Ike.
Oh ! Thanks for the info. I never had the joy/sadness of using either of those. I do fondly remember the old PDP 8 that we used to have to boot up with the ocal three fingered trick (flick, flick, flick, LOAD, repeat until the boot program is up to load the little curl of paper tape..) Ah, when computers were computers, and do do serious damage you had to live in close harmony with other geeks in a place called a computer center.....
DEC didnt' die. It was murdered by the CEO and middle management. They made attempts to get into the PC market (anyone remember "Rainbow" ?) with what was essentially a microVax, but that flopped. Sure, Compaq may have bought the dregs, but it was a dead, rotted corpse by the time the company sign went down.
That being said, they made some seriously bitchin hardware, that continues to be used to this day, and not just as central 'mainframes' for business/university users, but as embedded central processors in a lot of high tech (for the 80's) equipment. We keep an old PDP 8 CPU board on hand for an old CNC machine where I work. And getting the LS120 teletype to keep working.. whew !.
(I personally miss the old "Cookie Monster" shell script...)
I agree, but you have to look at the basic technology. Nuclear weapon's main issue is getting your hands on enough of the fissionable material. Doing that requires breeder reactors (not a small thing), massive chemical processing facilities, etc. (Until we figure out how to use Geobacter (Sorry about the soul sucking registration) to do it for us)
It used to be very very tough to generate a custom IC. Hell, it used to be very very tough to generate a computer program. And get it to communicate (anyone remember Kermit ?).
Biotech is experiencing the kind of wider quantuum leaps that IC technologies did in the 70's. As it continues to accelerate, and the tools get cheaper and easier to use, we'll definitely start seeing more oopses. My grandkids will learn whole new ways of dealing with crap like this.
And nope, there's no way to 'stop it'. Science and development are driven by human curiosity and ingenuity.
Yep- I recall a tour of the Federal Reserve (a Private Corporation, folks...) processing center in Cleveland. The operators enter through a glassed in area. They must disrobe. Then pass a security guard's station- nude. Then dress in uniform on the other side. The process is applied in reverse on the way home. Keep in mind that these guys process $Billions daily, and vault can handle around $1 Trillion in cash, and they get their currency in armored semis- $100 Million to a pallet of shrink-wrapped cash..
Of course, it might be an issue in the don't ask don't tell army....
Sorry, the logic there escapes me. Why the F*sck should any one work in an organized fashion to make their economy / industry / civilization totally dependent on a limited natural resource for the sole purpose of eating it all up 'so the poor countries can't have any' ?
Helloooo ! Anyone remember the 'starving children in China' reason for eating your vegetables when you were a kid ? guess what ? Those starving kids are eating your economy and your jobs, without using as much of that nasty old oil as you do !
100 years from now we're going to be back to being an agricultural society in the old "US of A". And those 'poor countries' who learned to work with less resources are all going to be laughing their collective asses off at us.
Back in the late 80's I was carting a sewing machine case portable Compaq '286 around on the job in an armpit of the universe place called Baluchistan. I needed a built in EPROM burner for programming this nice little tracking system. In PDP11 and FORTRAN. We were hurtling down the road one night, and camer around the corner to see a young camel doing the 'deer in the headlights' thing. We went into the ditch, the Compaq went into the front seat, I went into the dashboard.
Had to rewire the whole damn thing with leftover 30 gauge wiring and a butane soldering iron (thank god for Jensen tools).
So what ? Export licensing has been, and will always be, a hell of a joke. If other nations want our tech they can either buy it through third parties, steal it outright, or buy it through the very lossy and buggy 'export license' process. When I worked in defense, it was amazing how easily people could get licenses for all kinds of stuff. Example: ICBM development technology to Pakistan and India in the 1980's. (Sure, they bought their main missle tech from China and the USSR, but they bought a lot of tech from the US of A too.) It was licensed for 'civilian space exploration' and 'satellite launch'. Yeah, right.
It's just another potential trade barrier to US goods. Your Tax Dollars at Work !
There is a certain symmetry to having the item repaired by the same company that often broke it in the first place.
Now if Toshiba can only set it up so the UPS repair center has to ship Fed Ex, they won't end up in an endless loop.
1-Dropkick Laptop onto 20 mile long conveyor belt.
2-Deliver laptop to customers door. Leave under bush in rain.
3-Customer fusses with laptop for a week, finally returns it to repair center.
4- Repair center replaces damaged, missing, or just those items that they have a lot of in stock.
5- Repeat...
Thanks for the ref info, all. Nice to see software / hardware companies giving out/back and being innovative instead of lawyering up all the time. (Yeah, I know, Apple sues like everyone else sometimes.)
It's also nice to see the Apple face on Unix. My 6 year old doesn't know he's using "Unix". he just pushes the mouse and the little truck drives all over the screen... Reminds me of that scene from Jurassic Park when the preteen girl says "Hey, this is Unix. I can fix this !".
Darn. Scooped again.. .
Note that this technology is NOT Apple's. It's the result of the ZerConf Group. Apple just took the idea and made it 'just work'. And yes, it sounds interesting, and a little scary that all them UDP packets will be whizzing around.
OTOH, the reduction of ICANN and other DNS 'gods'is one of the nice benefits of P2P technology like ZeroConf.
I second the Patenting the Obvious. This is just another case of the USPTO giving out patents for damn near anything, without thought or consideration. I'm going to patent breathing. Then I'll sue everything with lungs....
Sure, but why play solar power generation at all ? We've got a big honking static electricity generator going here. Lift up/ drop down a cable. (insulated exterior, waveguide, whatever you need). Inflate a few nice biiiig silvery baloon thingies. Let it run through the atmosphere. ZZZap!.
Sure- you can post a few tables with nice sewn together corpses at the bottom (yes, master).
Downside ? Might reduce lightning storms on the planet, which may affect plant and animal life, etc.
Big downside ? Remember Odyssey 3010's quote:
"Supernovae are Industrial Accidents".
Yes but-
Like SPAM, which lives on lists of email addresses, telemarketers lived in lists of telephone numbers. With the 'death' of the industry, the main lists seem to have died out (thank gawd). My call volume went from 2-5 per day to 1 per week, usually a 'charitable' organization. The callers from India and the Phillipines stopped after about a month after the DNCL went into effect.
Most of 'em are stopped when you ask for a phone number and company name and address. They hang up quick.
now the real question- How can I make bucks off the guys who call me without checking the list ? Do I have to sue ? Do I have to have some physical evidence like a recording or a 'legal log' ? I want some bucks !
Sure, but the average user is, basically, unaware. They are trying to get their work done, or their game loaded, and they've been so inured to clicking "OK" to every damn popup that they have no idea what they are agreeing to. Reminds me of the Dilbert "The House is Coming for you" series of cartoons.
Until the OS makes things a little more secure (like, um, say telling the user that they cannot stay logged in as an admin for more than 5 minutes without solving some sort of intelligence and/or paranoia test..), we're always going to have these problems.
Especially since nations cannot cleanly make laws that affect a non-national phenomenon like the 'new.
"Think of it as evolution in action". (Larry Niven)
Wow ! What a cool perk for the poor kiddies who have to deal with all those sticky seats and whining kids ! I see a lot more use of the NVG's that get 'borrowed' after the cinema closes. Anyone ever tried night driving with NVG's ? It's very cool- something about blowing past the cops lights off on a dark highway. (I tried it many years ago with a pair of USG pilot's NVG's.)
The first time I had a fully automatic rifle pointed at me was at Orly airport in Paris, France. By a very LARGE french Para. Whose buddy then went through the suitcase of a very frightened 13 year old American boy, and confiscated the very dangerous aftershave (for the possibly one time a year I had to shave). Probably because he liked it. That was shortly after some friendly, suffering, oppressed Palestinians decided to kill a whole shitload of unspecting French citizens. The first time I had an automatic rifle FIRED at me was in Pakistan, when the "Democratic" government happily took over the country after the Dictator's airplane "Crashed" (amazing what a Stinger missle up the ass will do to a C-130). People who complain that we're 'going too far' are people who haven't had fucking terrorist assholes screw with them recently. Everyone else understands, and tends to laugh at the people in this country who are bitching. You (citizens) can still say what you want here. You can still vote here. You can still bear arms here (except in NY NY where only all the criminals bear arms). Are some people over-reacting and seeing terrorist everywhere ? Sure. Are some cops over-reacting ? Sure. Is the Constitution coming to an end because Bush is President ? No.
US Made markers are cast iron based in a triangular shape (snowplow-able). An automated truck mounted machine (at least in Ohio) grinds a depression in the road, drops the reflector in the hole with a nice goopy base of heavey duty QD epoxy, and voila. There is no reason you cannot do this with electromagical gizmos. I would expect a replacement removal/installation system to be similar. Having them write traffic tickets would make 'em self-funding.
I worked on a project like this in 1979 as an undergrad research assistant at an engineering school in Ohio. It was an USAF project. The key to the research was that there were a discrete number of points on the human face (mostly relating to underlying bone structure), and the vectors between the points provided a unique and relatively unchangeable identifier. We used some (for the time) slick image processing algorithms to figure it all out- and had, as I recall, around 85% hit rate. Your defense dollars at work, kids.
(Of course, I was in the project for the lab key- gave me a nice place to take girls on weekends..)
The short answer is that they know you're running a router. Pretty soon I expect them to require us poor lusers to use the USB 'interface' on the modem, and deactivate the Ethernet port. Yeah, sure, we can work around that too- it's a classic case of armor and armament (The armament always wins, but you keep having to upgrade it). It's just annoying that I'm going to have to PAY for this abuse !
Agreed. Just got one of their love letters "You have more than one IP address from our gateway". They want to sell me "Home Networking" or charge me an additional $4.99 per IP address. Now I've gotta reconfigure the network. (Damn).
And what makes you think they will allow us to use firewalls and routers after their modems ? I can see the letter now:
"Dear Comcast Luser,
We have determined that you are using a ______ router to redistribute your internet connection to other users, in direct contravention of our agreement with the Department of Homeland Security. This has had the effect of making it impossible for us to allow anyone with a badge to spy into your home computer, per the agreement that you signed. (Note that the agreement has been changed, and the confidential elements of the agreement are above your current security clearance. If you wish to see them, please petition the Supreme Court.)
Your bandwidth has been restricted to 1 byte/hr for any sites not ending in a.gov. You will still be paying $19.95 for the first two seconds of your agreement, and $499.95 for each month afterwards.
Government 'controlled' Monopolies - don't they have that backwards ?
This is NOT news. AOL's been allowing this for at least a year or so. Just via a weird port (587?). I set it up on my Mac a month ago after reading about it on dealmac. Even sets up a nice little "SPAM" folder so I don't have to carefully save and pore over those letters from that poor Nigerian guy who is lost in space.
Fine, stop the infected machines from DDOs'ing. But hey, can the SERVICE be a little more SERVICE friendly ?
Like this:
DHCP Message comes up:
"Dear Comca$t customer.
Your computer seems to be infected with a computer virus. We will only allow you access to our FREE antivirus tools site until you have resolved this problem. Please contact us at blah,. blah, blah".
Then let 'em into a site that they control with standard tools to detect and blow away those worms."
Might make the customers happy instead of ticked off.
Piffle !
Aldous Huxley's "Feelies".
Arthur Clarke's book "Imperial Earth" had a brief meeting with a couple who were 'Tapeworms', equipped with a device exactly like M$'s "that recorded everything they saw and heard, as if they did not exist without it".
I wonder if anyone is looking at Prior Art ?
(at least Clarke got credit for GeoSats).
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like transportation and its efficiency and costs directly impact lifestyle and societal structures. Now here is a lifestyle amish.net that is not impacted by high fuel costs. Grass for the horses, sweat and elbow grease for the humans. Basic input= food. Basic output= life. Suburbs and Exurbs, large urban areas, Freeways, etc. are all derived from the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act . We get what we pay for- tax dollars that created a system of life that made us dependent on a limited source of fuel. Thanks, Ike.
Oh ! Thanks for the info. I never had the joy/sadness of using either of those. I do fondly remember the old PDP 8 that we used to have to boot up with the ocal three fingered trick (flick, flick, flick, LOAD, repeat until the boot program is up to load the little curl of paper tape..) Ah, when computers were computers, and do do serious damage you had to live in close harmony with other geeks in a place called a computer center.....
DEC didnt' die. It was murdered by the CEO and middle management. They made attempts to get into the PC market (anyone remember "Rainbow" ?) with what was essentially a microVax, but that flopped. Sure, Compaq may have bought the dregs, but it was a dead, rotted corpse by the time the company sign went down. That being said, they made some seriously bitchin hardware, that continues to be used to this day, and not just as central 'mainframes' for business/university users, but as embedded central processors in a lot of high tech (for the 80's) equipment. We keep an old PDP 8 CPU board on hand for an old CNC machine where I work. And getting the LS120 teletype to keep working.. whew !. (I personally miss the old "Cookie Monster" shell script...)
I agree, but you have to look at the basic technology. Nuclear weapon's main issue is getting your hands on enough of the fissionable material. Doing that requires breeder reactors (not a small thing), massive chemical processing facilities, etc. (Until we figure out how to use Geobacter (Sorry about the soul sucking registration) to do it for us) It used to be very very tough to generate a custom IC. Hell, it used to be very very tough to generate a computer program. And get it to communicate (anyone remember Kermit ?). Biotech is experiencing the kind of wider quantuum leaps that IC technologies did in the 70's. As it continues to accelerate, and the tools get cheaper and easier to use, we'll definitely start seeing more oopses. My grandkids will learn whole new ways of dealing with crap like this. And nope, there's no way to 'stop it'. Science and development are driven by human curiosity and ingenuity.
Yep- I recall a tour of the Federal Reserve (a Private Corporation, folks...) processing center in Cleveland. The operators enter through a glassed in area. They must disrobe. Then pass a security guard's station- nude. Then dress in uniform on the other side. The process is applied in reverse on the way home. Keep in mind that these guys process $Billions daily, and vault can handle around $1 Trillion in cash, and they get their currency in armored semis- $100 Million to a pallet of shrink-wrapped cash.. Of course, it might be an issue in the don't ask don't tell army....
Sorry, the logic there escapes me. Why the F*sck should any one work in an organized fashion to make their economy / industry / civilization totally dependent on a limited natural resource for the sole purpose of eating it all up 'so the poor countries can't have any' ? Helloooo ! Anyone remember the 'starving children in China' reason for eating your vegetables when you were a kid ? guess what ? Those starving kids are eating your economy and your jobs, without using as much of that nasty old oil as you do ! 100 years from now we're going to be back to being an agricultural society in the old "US of A". And those 'poor countries' who learned to work with less resources are all going to be laughing their collective asses off at us.
Back in the late 80's I was carting a sewing machine case portable Compaq '286 around on the job in an armpit of the universe place called Baluchistan. I needed a built in EPROM burner for programming this nice little tracking system. In PDP11 and FORTRAN. We were hurtling down the road one night, and camer around the corner to see a young camel doing the 'deer in the headlights' thing. We went into the ditch, the Compaq went into the front seat, I went into the dashboard. Had to rewire the whole damn thing with leftover 30 gauge wiring and a butane soldering iron (thank god for Jensen tools).
So what ? Export licensing has been, and will always be, a hell of a joke. If other nations want our tech they can either buy it through third parties, steal it outright, or buy it through the very lossy and buggy 'export license' process. When I worked in defense, it was amazing how easily people could get licenses for all kinds of stuff. Example: ICBM development technology to Pakistan and India in the 1980's. (Sure, they bought their main missle tech from China and the USSR, but they bought a lot of tech from the US of A too.) It was licensed for 'civilian space exploration' and 'satellite launch'. Yeah, right. It's just another potential trade barrier to US goods. Your Tax Dollars at Work !
There is a certain symmetry to having the item repaired by the same company that often broke it in the first place. Now if Toshiba can only set it up so the UPS repair center has to ship Fed Ex, they won't end up in an endless loop. 1-Dropkick Laptop onto 20 mile long conveyor belt. 2-Deliver laptop to customers door. Leave under bush in rain. 3-Customer fusses with laptop for a week, finally returns it to repair center. 4- Repair center replaces damaged, missing, or just those items that they have a lot of in stock. 5- Repeat...
Thanks for the ref info, all. Nice to see software / hardware companies giving out/back and being innovative instead of lawyering up all the time. (Yeah, I know, Apple sues like everyone else sometimes.) It's also nice to see the Apple face on Unix. My 6 year old doesn't know he's using "Unix". he just pushes the mouse and the little truck drives all over the screen... Reminds me of that scene from Jurassic Park when the preteen girl says "Hey, this is Unix. I can fix this !".
Darn. Scooped again.. . Note that this technology is NOT Apple's. It's the result of the ZerConf Group. Apple just took the idea and made it 'just work'. And yes, it sounds interesting, and a little scary that all them UDP packets will be whizzing around. OTOH, the reduction of ICANN and other DNS 'gods'is one of the nice benefits of P2P technology like ZeroConf.
I second the Patenting the Obvious.
This is just another case of the USPTO giving out patents for damn near anything, without thought or consideration.
I'm going to patent breathing. Then I'll sue everything with lungs....
Sure, but why play solar power generation at all ? We've got a big honking static electricity generator going here. Lift up/ drop down a cable. (insulated exterior, waveguide, whatever you need). Inflate a few nice biiiig silvery baloon thingies. Let it run through the atmosphere. ZZZap!. Sure- you can post a few tables with nice sewn together corpses at the bottom (yes, master). Downside ? Might reduce lightning storms on the planet, which may affect plant and animal life, etc. Big downside ? Remember Odyssey 3010's quote: "Supernovae are Industrial Accidents".
Yes but- Like SPAM, which lives on lists of email addresses, telemarketers lived in lists of telephone numbers. With the 'death' of the industry, the main lists seem to have died out (thank gawd). My call volume went from 2-5 per day to 1 per week, usually a 'charitable' organization. The callers from India and the Phillipines stopped after about a month after the DNCL went into effect. Most of 'em are stopped when you ask for a phone number and company name and address. They hang up quick. now the real question- How can I make bucks off the guys who call me without checking the list ? Do I have to sue ? Do I have to have some physical evidence like a recording or a 'legal log' ? I want some bucks !
Sure, but the average user is, basically, unaware. They are trying to get their work done, or their game loaded, and they've been so inured to clicking "OK" to every damn popup that they have no idea what they are agreeing to. Reminds me of the Dilbert "The House is Coming for you" series of cartoons. Until the OS makes things a little more secure (like, um, say telling the user that they cannot stay logged in as an admin for more than 5 minutes without solving some sort of intelligence and/or paranoia test..), we're always going to have these problems. Especially since nations cannot cleanly make laws that affect a non-national phenomenon like the 'new. "Think of it as evolution in action". (Larry Niven)
Something unique to good of ameri/aussie/hawaiian culture: Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: "Charlie don't surf! " (Apocalypse Now) Try offshoring that !
Wow ! What a cool perk for the poor kiddies who have to deal with all those sticky seats and whining kids ! I see a lot more use of the NVG's that get 'borrowed' after the cinema closes. Anyone ever tried night driving with NVG's ? It's very cool- something about blowing past the cops lights off on a dark highway. (I tried it many years ago with a pair of USG pilot's NVG's.)
The first time I had a fully automatic rifle pointed at me was at Orly airport in Paris, France. By a very LARGE french Para. Whose buddy then went through the suitcase of a very frightened 13 year old American boy, and confiscated the very dangerous aftershave (for the possibly one time a year I had to shave). Probably because he liked it.
That was shortly after some friendly, suffering, oppressed Palestinians decided to kill a whole shitload of unspecting French citizens.
The first time I had an automatic rifle FIRED at me was in Pakistan, when the "Democratic" government happily took over the country after the Dictator's airplane "Crashed" (amazing what a Stinger missle up the ass will do to a C-130).
People who complain that we're 'going too far' are people who haven't had fucking terrorist assholes screw with them recently. Everyone else understands, and tends to laugh at the people in this country who are bitching.
You (citizens) can still say what you want here. You can still vote here. You can still bear arms here (except in NY NY where only all the criminals bear arms).
Are some people over-reacting and seeing terrorist everywhere ? Sure.
Are some cops over-reacting ? Sure.
Is the Constitution coming to an end because Bush is President ?
No.
US Made markers are cast iron based in a triangular shape (snowplow-able). An automated truck mounted machine (at least in Ohio) grinds a depression in the road, drops the reflector in the hole with a nice goopy base of heavey duty QD epoxy, and voila. There is no reason you cannot do this with electromagical gizmos. I would expect a replacement removal/installation system to be similar. Having them write traffic tickets would make 'em self-funding.
I worked on a project like this in 1979 as an undergrad research assistant at an engineering school in Ohio. It was an USAF project. The key to the research was that there were a discrete number of points on the human face (mostly relating to underlying bone structure), and the vectors between the points provided a unique and relatively unchangeable identifier. We used some (for the time) slick image processing algorithms to figure it all out- and had, as I recall, around 85% hit rate.
Your defense dollars at work, kids.
(Of course, I was in the project for the lab key- gave me a nice place to take girls on weekends..)
The short answer is that they know you're running a router. Pretty soon I expect them to require us poor lusers to use the USB 'interface' on the modem, and deactivate the Ethernet port. Yeah, sure, we can work around that too- it's a classic case of armor and armament (The armament always wins, but you keep having to upgrade it). It's just annoying that I'm going to have to PAY for this abuse !
Agreed. Just got one of their love letters "You have more than one IP address from our gateway". They want to sell me "Home Networking" or charge me an additional $4.99 per IP address. Now I've gotta reconfigure the network. (Damn). And what makes you think they will allow us to use firewalls and routers after their modems ? I can see the letter now: "Dear Comcast Luser, We have determined that you are using a ______ router to redistribute your internet connection to other users, in direct contravention of our agreement with the Department of Homeland Security. This has had the effect of making it impossible for us to allow anyone with a badge to spy into your home computer, per the agreement that you signed. (Note that the agreement has been changed, and the confidential elements of the agreement are above your current security clearance. If you wish to see them, please petition the Supreme Court.) Your bandwidth has been restricted to 1 byte/hr for any sites not ending in a .gov. You will still be paying $19.95 for the first two seconds of your agreement, and $499.95 for each month afterwards.
Government 'controlled' Monopolies - don't they have that backwards ?
This is NOT news. AOL's been allowing this for at least a year or so. Just via a weird port (587?). I set it up on my Mac a month ago after reading about it on dealmac. Even sets up a nice little "SPAM" folder so I don't have to carefully save and pore over those letters from that poor Nigerian guy who is lost in space.
Fine, stop the infected machines from DDOs'ing. But hey, can the SERVICE be a little more SERVICE friendly ? Like this: DHCP Message comes up: "Dear Comca$t customer. Your computer seems to be infected with a computer virus. We will only allow you access to our FREE antivirus tools site until you have resolved this problem. Please contact us at blah,. blah, blah". Then let 'em into a site that they control with standard tools to detect and blow away those worms." Might make the customers happy instead of ticked off.
Piffle ! Aldous Huxley's "Feelies". Arthur Clarke's book "Imperial Earth" had a brief meeting with a couple who were 'Tapeworms', equipped with a device exactly like M$'s "that recorded everything they saw and heard, as if they did not exist without it". I wonder if anyone is looking at Prior Art ? (at least Clarke got credit for GeoSats).