If you've been comfortable with the world we've been in for, oh, say, the past several thousand years , well all I can say is you're doing it wrong. This sort of thing (minus the computer stuff) has been going on for as long as humans have written things down.
Not necessarily. Asymmetric warfare is never that simple. If things in the US got bad enough for a general revolt, it would be unlikely that it would set up as the police / military vs. 'the people'. It would be more of a civil war situation where people would be siding with or against the government depending on location, religion, economics and / or other criteria.
There would likely be defections from military and certainly local police. It would be gorilla style warfare rather than set piece battles. Rifles and shotguns would be very useful. F35's not so much - you don't want to flatten your own territory.
Now, if you are really planning on dealing with this sort of thing you should also stock up on small UAVs, timer chips, thermite, diesel fuel and fertilizer as well as practicing small squad tactics. But it's lots more fun to complain and destroy targets at the range.
So, this story is definitely an amusing anecdote, but I feel like TFA has the wrong takeaway. The fact is, while this specific issue is obviously e-book related, the overall problem of poor quality, low cost public domain publications is in no way specific to e-books. There have always been low budget publishing houses that print poorly edited, poorly translated versions of public domain works. Spend some time digging around used book sales, you'll find an endless supply of these, most notably from the 60's and 70's.
No, the sad part is full price books from Amazon with incoherent pagination, horribly over recompressed jpegs and a verdant sea of spelling errors. I'd give Project Gutenberg a pass for those sorts of things except that the majority of PG books I've read are actually pretty well done.
When I'm paying top dollar for a product, I'd like some attempt at quality control....
You keep saying stuff like this. It's not going to be well received on this thread. You're just lucky we're on the Internet or we might be tempted to stuff YOU into one of those nifty little shells.
...and the little nicks and scrapes people incur as they just try to get their damn lightbulb out.
Not to mention the estimate 6,000 - 7,000 people a year who get cut badly enough to seek treatment in emergency rooms!
If we're down to the 'several thousand' of a particular injury per year then we're in the territory of injuries due to contact with spacecraft (ICD 10 code WX849OXA), initial turtle attacks (W5921XA) or repetitive turtle attacks (W5921XD) and other similarly major dangers to civilization.
I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener".
The AIr Force always wants more lift. Space vehicles are always weight constrained. More lift = More War Toys for the Boys.
Remember that much of the screwball engineering that the Shuttle played around with was so that the Air Force could have a space bomber. The AF's constantly morphing (and increasing) requirements were one of the primary reasons the system was such a complicated mess. The other reason, of course, being Congress's insistence that it be produced in pretty much every ZIP code in the country.
Well, the translation of the TFA (as opposed to the bizzarro summary) is that climate models are very difficult to parse and so it's easier to talk about pretty much anything else. Even the culturally congruent lefties don't use modeling much.
Doesn't surprise me. I'm a biologist by training, grew up in the era of quantitative biology and still find the reporting on the models pretty much useless. I don't really have a good feel for exactly how good the models are, how fast they change, what their strong points are, what their weak points are.
I could spend the time to read the literature, except that I really can't. That would involve hundreds of hours of skull sweat that frankly I don't have even if I do have the background to assimilate it. And most people don't have that background.
So, for the vast majority of humans, it does boil down to a leap of faith. I have more faith in dedicated scientists from multiple disciplines and localities working with inadequate, but nonetheless rather powerful, tools and concepts than in governmental / religious / financial institutions with a really narrow financial / social viewpoint.
I would say it is not even a solution looking for a problem.. it is an old solution solving the same problems it did before, only rebranded and getting a lot more attention by consumers. Once the type settles down, I am guessing, not much will change. Use cases that lend themselves to this type of client/server system will continue to use them, while use cases that lend themselves to local computing will continue to use them.
Christ. Does this mean we will have to go though all of this again? Maybe by that time I'll be senile enough to not notice.
In either case, the cars in the train should identify the vehicle and notify the authorities. It would also help to update the traffic law to make it only legal to join a road train from the back with an approved autonomous tracking system. Anything else results in an expensive fine and a moving violation on the driver's record.
Just be easier if the train had defensive weaponry and could shoot back. In fact, I'd join a train for just that option alone..... Hmmm....
Evolution ? Of humans ? Since the beginning of medicine, since we save the weak and the sick, evolution is not a natural process anymore, but something we control ourselves as a civilization.
Oh it's evolution all right. "Natural" or not, it's the same thing. We're selecting for traits that are advantageous at the point in time the selection occurs. In the case of the 'weak' or 'frail' we are making a conscious selection to keep these folks around for whatever reason. In the long run, it may help or hurt if the selection pressure on humans changes. Perhaps allowing kids who were born premature, who would not have survived except for the intervention of modern medicine, to survive and breed will pass along some genes that allow for their kids to survive in a high CO2 environment (or what ever). You don't know. Any time you select genes you're evolving.
Remember, evolution doesn't move in any particular 'direction'. Newer isn't better, just more adapt to the local environment. Change the environment, change the needed adaption and life goes on.
Decoding the genome =! reintroducing changes. So no, you don't get human walks in - Gene Enhanced Creature walks out of the boutique DNA store.
It's actually not clear exactly what you get. Likely not much for clinical medicine just yet. More likely a boon to the rest of biology. Imagine being able to sequence little bugs / plants / exciting and unusual critters from your pond scum in a hour. That allows you to break open biological systematics so that we can really create finely detailed maps of the ebb and flow of genetic material over the planet.
You could also find out if your sister was really your sister, or indeed even human. But you could do that now with SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) for a couple of bucks and a Priority Mail envelope.
TFA purports that somebody wrote a bunch of code that is a virus, trojan, malware and toaster driver all at once. Nobody knows who did it or why, but they must be very smart. It hijacks data, voice, video and neural transmissions and appears to be able to perform telekinesis. It was likely written sometime after 1996 and before 2021.
It's big.. Really big. So big that it would fit on any USB drive or email attachment created since, well, 1996.
It's smart. Really smart. So smart that it's going to take us literally months of press reports to get it out.
It goes after the Usual Suspects. It may or may not be related to Stuxnet, tilde, Steven P. Jobs or George Bush (either or both of them).
For some strange reason, the coders wrote the thing pretty much unobfuscated. Except that unobfuscated isn't a word.
Slashdot Mirror
is not a world that I am comfortable with.
If you've been comfortable with the world we've been in for, oh, say, the past several thousand years , well all I can say is you're doing it wrong. This sort of thing (minus the computer stuff) has been going on for as long as humans have written things down.
Been there.
Done that.
(Siberian pipeline sabotage by the CIA).
The only thing that's new here is that we did it on the Internet. So we should just patent it and give it a go.
Gun control means using two hands!
Not necessarily. Asymmetric warfare is never that simple. If things in the US got bad enough for a general revolt, it would be unlikely that it would set up as the police / military vs. 'the people'. It would be more of a civil war situation where people would be siding with or against the government depending on location, religion, economics and / or other criteria.
There would likely be defections from military and certainly local police. It would be gorilla style warfare rather than set piece battles. Rifles and shotguns would be very useful. F35's not so much - you don't want to flatten your own territory.
Now, if you are really planning on dealing with this sort of thing you should also stock up on small UAVs, timer chips, thermite, diesel fuel and fertilizer as well as practicing small squad tactics. But it's lots more fun to complain and destroy targets at the range.
So, this story is definitely an amusing anecdote, but I feel like TFA has the wrong takeaway. The fact is, while this specific issue is obviously e-book related, the overall problem of poor quality, low cost public domain publications is in no way specific to e-books. There have always been low budget publishing houses that print poorly edited, poorly translated versions of public domain works. Spend some time digging around used book sales, you'll find an endless supply of these, most notably from the 60's and 70's.
No, the sad part is full price books from Amazon with incoherent pagination, horribly over recompressed jpegs and a verdant sea of spelling errors. I'd give Project Gutenberg a pass for those sorts of things except that the majority of PG books I've read are actually pretty well done.
When I'm paying top dollar for a product, I'd like some attempt at quality control....
You keep saying stuff like this. It's not going to be well received on this thread. You're just lucky we're on the Internet or we might be tempted to stuff YOU into one of those nifty little shells.
Just sayin'.
...and the little nicks and scrapes people incur as they just try to get their damn lightbulb out.
Not to mention the estimate 6,000 - 7,000 people a year who get cut badly enough to seek treatment in emergency rooms!
If we're down to the 'several thousand' of a particular injury per year then we're in the territory of injuries due to contact with spacecraft (ICD 10 code WX849OXA), initial turtle attacks (W5921XA) or repetitive turtle attacks (W5921XD) and other similarly major dangers to civilization.
Not to worry.
Yes. At least that.
I got a handy little tool from Think Geek called "The Plastic Surgeon" that works pretty well.
Did it come in a plastic clamshell package?
Another key advantage is that it's very effective at protecting goods in shipping.
Which, of course, explains why the last chisel I bought was hermetically sealed in an indestructible plastic clamshell package.
Really guys, get some perspective on things.
RedHat probably spent more than $99 in coffee staying awake long enough to just get a hold of somebody at Microsoft to take their money.
That's entirely off-topic. Did you even TFA?
Maybe his DNS server is from North Carolina or similar and it's resolving Slashdot.org to RandomBibleVerseToday.com.
I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener".
LSD is going to make a comeback?
Wow.
That's not an argument for government control over soda, it's an argument against socialized healthcare.
If so, the argument comes a bit too late to be effective. Socialized medicine in the US started in 1964 with the advent of Medicare.
What would change about ESA to make it at all cost-competitive with SpaceX?
Maybe put all their money in a PayPal account?
The AIr Force always wants more lift. Space vehicles are always weight constrained. More lift = More War Toys for the Boys.
Remember that much of the screwball engineering that the Shuttle played around with was so that the Air Force could have a space bomber. The AF's constantly morphing (and increasing) requirements were one of the primary reasons the system was such a complicated mess. The other reason, of course, being Congress's insistence that it be produced in pretty much every ZIP code in the country.
Yes. AC is a maroon.
SpaceX joins a pretty select club of large, technologically advanced nation-states in 'just' getting something up to LEO (and back).
It is rocket science.
(Of course, now Elon has the basis of an ICBM program of his very own. Cue evil laughter sound track....)
Well, the translation of the TFA (as opposed to the bizzarro summary) is that climate models are very difficult to parse and so it's easier to talk about pretty much anything else. Even the culturally congruent lefties don't use modeling much.
Doesn't surprise me. I'm a biologist by training, grew up in the era of quantitative biology and still find the reporting on the models pretty much useless. I don't really have a good feel for exactly how good the models are, how fast they change, what their strong points are, what their weak points are.
I could spend the time to read the literature, except that I really can't. That would involve hundreds of hours of skull sweat that frankly I don't have even if I do have the background to assimilate it. And most people don't have that background.
So, for the vast majority of humans, it does boil down to a leap of faith. I have more faith in dedicated scientists from multiple disciplines and localities working with inadequate, but nonetheless rather powerful, tools and concepts than in governmental / religious / financial institutions with a really narrow financial / social viewpoint.
But that's just me.
I would say it is not even a solution looking for a problem.. it is an old solution solving the same problems it did before, only rebranded and getting a lot more attention by consumers. Once the type settles down, I am guessing, not much will change. Use cases that lend themselves to this type of client/server system will continue to use them, while use cases that lend themselves to local computing will continue to use them.
Christ. Does this mean we will have to go though all of this again? Maybe by that time I'll be senile enough to not notice.
Didn't read the TFA again?
That's the entire point of the software.
In either case, the cars in the train should identify the vehicle and notify the authorities. It would also help to update the traffic law to make it only legal to join a road train from the back with an approved autonomous tracking system. Anything else results in an expensive fine and a moving violation on the driver's record.
Just be easier if the train had defensive weaponry and could shoot back. In fact, I'd join a train for just that option alone..... Hmmm....
Evolution ? Of humans ? Since the beginning of medicine, since we save the weak and the sick, evolution is not a natural process anymore, but something we control ourselves as a civilization.
Oh it's evolution all right. "Natural" or not, it's the same thing. We're selecting for traits that are advantageous at the point in time the selection occurs. In the case of the 'weak' or 'frail' we are making a conscious selection to keep these folks around for whatever reason. In the long run, it may help or hurt if the selection pressure on humans changes. Perhaps allowing kids who were born premature, who would not have survived except for the intervention of modern medicine, to survive and breed will pass along some genes that allow for their kids to survive in a high CO2 environment (or what ever). You don't know. Any time you select genes you're evolving.
Remember, evolution doesn't move in any particular 'direction'. Newer isn't better, just more adapt to the local environment. Change the environment, change the needed adaption and life goes on.
Nature cares not.
Decoding the genome =! reintroducing changes. So no, you don't get human walks in - Gene Enhanced Creature walks out of the boutique DNA store.
It's actually not clear exactly what you get. Likely not much for clinical medicine just yet. More likely a boon to the rest of biology. Imagine being able to sequence little bugs / plants / exciting and unusual critters from your pond scum in a hour. That allows you to break open biological systematics so that we can really create finely detailed maps of the ebb and flow of genetic material over the planet.
You could also find out if your sister was really your sister, or indeed even human. But you could do that now with SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) for a couple of bucks and a Priority Mail envelope.
Wow. I didn't realize the Canadians were so good at spying.
Oh Canada!
TFA purports that somebody wrote a bunch of code that is a virus, trojan, malware and toaster driver all at once. Nobody knows who did it or why, but they must be very smart. It hijacks data, voice, video and neural transmissions and appears to be able to perform telekinesis. It was likely written sometime after 1996 and before 2021.
It's big.. Really big. So big that it would fit on any USB drive or email attachment created since, well, 1996.
It's smart. Really smart. So smart that it's going to take us literally months of press reports to get it out.
It goes after the Usual Suspects. It may or may not be related to Stuxnet, tilde, Steven P. Jobs or George Bush (either or both of them).
For some strange reason, the coders wrote the thing pretty much unobfuscated. Except that unobfuscated isn't a word.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.