I would just like to say that while I have not used either extensively yet, I have accounts on Linode.com and Hostgator.com and both have given me free upgrades since signup.
I quit my old company because not only were they incompetent, they also turned out to be charging me premium rates for what was now less than their lowest level package.
Seeing this thread I checked Hostgator and glory be, 600GB of storage space where there only used to be IIRC 200GB.
My first reaction was "then don't use Hotmail". But actually while I abhor MS and use Gmail, I'd prefer MS fixes their service to work with Firefox.
I find Gmail to be sub-par considering that it is generates income via ads. In particular:
no folders
no way to color items to come back to them (other than set to unread status, or starring them - heck Macs have had color labels since forever)
inability to search on partial names (of email addresses; I have a client named r.ueda@xxxxx and cannot search for "ueda" only "r.ueda".)
and search system in general sucks considering how many search experts they have on board. they could do a heck of a lot more.
inability to email phones of the largest Japanese phone company (have had people tell me Japanese is corrupted when emailed from them, but corporate email works fine - they probably just need to encode correctly and assume phones don't do UTF8 I expect)
spam system needs work (better at least than what yahoo used to have. but if 10,000 people get the same spam they should call it black spam, while if their filter picks up a client of mine and says probably spam they should mark it light-grey or green spam. Then let me filter/search with a color wheel).
limited visualization
limited user initiated spam filtering
no way to indicate important clients (who should show up at top in red I think)
very confusing how to find where to submit reports
other things..
I have contacted google about a couple issues, such as the phone issue which was NOT resolved. In general I find they are incapable of actually conducting a discussion with a user or saying they are not perfect. And I hate to say this since I like Google.
Anyway I would like to see Google have real competition so they are forced to maintain and improve their own service, rather than only get the benefit of MS' stupid lock-in strategies and not real competition. Maybe MS buying Yahoo will keep google on their toes?
NO no no. I live in Japan fuck off what are you talking about? No need to be rude.
The commonly accepted standard is YYYY X M X D X where the X's are kanji characters. These are translated into dot notation commonly. It works in descending order which makes sense.
I am not aware of any Europeans who use year first. The ambiguity to which you refer is due to the difference in order M-D or D-M used when writing out the full month name in the western world. I submit that by using a dot notation it is simpler and more logical.
You do not write your IP address backwards do you? No. You write in progressively smaller magnitude groups, the same way as the decimal system works, another successful international standard. Of course dyslexics are screwed but if you must remove place signifiers at least YYYY.MM.DD makes the most sense, especially on the net.
Someone mentioned sponges. I was thinking along a different line, that if you have a long thin straw especially if the reservoir is stiff maybe it is hard to suck it out. So if you had more openings at the mouth end it would multiply the ease with which you could extract liquid (or is it really just herding barely connected globules into the air floating in the middle of the ribbon, in which case not so hard).
This kind of a tree-like network could be three dimensional, like a rock or well a shower head you stick in your mouth. (Maybe more the size of a thumb, but with holes all over it) and connected to a thin tube that is coiled up, or maybe inserted into a pouch. Or you could do it two-dimensionally, a series of flat tubes that branch like a tree, and then roll that up into a cone (not a hollow cone, more like a stromboli, so it ends with a solid looking spiral of compressed pipe-paper with all the open ends towards the mouth. This might cut the mouth if it isn't made of soft material though.
Of course not knowing the real issues this could be useless, but if you did have a vessel containing liquid that was not automatically deforming (or it deforms but not so much), then you could accept making it hard to extract the liquid if you also have a system like this shower head drink nozzle that hydraulically magnifies your ability to suck the liquid out. You might even be able to pinch it closed and then when you open it the liquid pours out naturally. This wouldn't work with drinks that have globs of things in it.
There also is a thing that's a hit on the streets, it's tapioca cubes in ice tea, in a plastic cup sealed with a plastic membrane lid. You stick a very wide straw into it through the lid. Possibly this would work in orbit especially if you could include a cloth spiral inside the straw and curve (coil) the straw once to force globules to follow the path.
There are less young people going into farming these days. These suits will be good for aging farmers as well as maybe making it less backbreaking or more interesting to young people I'd think too.
Of course the real robotic farmer that can plant rice by himself? I dunno, the Emperor does that himself you know, can the robot really plant delicious rice? Rice has a spiritual place in Japanese religion too.
But my guess is this would be an excellent way to really test robots in the field especially when you aren't supposed to be military really.
There are plenty of poor kids outside Alabama too. Could be seen by some as giving sub-par systems to poor kids but as they actually are very high-tech, just maybe not your fiery game machine, this could even be seen as an advantage. Smart kids in the U.S. could have input into a national/global education system based on free software and free courseware. I can't see it going anywhere but up.
Obviously it's worth it. Here's an example I just thought of. I was thinking of actually being an astronaut in orbit doing work in outer space. I haven't thought from this perspective in maybe a year, and that was when I was reading an excellent manga on space exploration, Moonlight Mile.
I was thinking that when robots are in space or say on Mars they look at different bands of electromagnetic radiation than humans do. They are more likely to have a couple of bands of infrared than red, on Mars apparently. But space is where you push the envelope. It would at least be neat, and would seem useful, if astronaut's helmets could have integral cameras and other sensors that serve to extend the amount of spectrum visible to them. (Maybe they have it, but I never heard of it so far.)
By using the helmet as a heads-up display, or possibly just painting the retina with a laser, it would be possible to overlay what the scene ahead looks like in infrared, ultraviolet, or perhaps radar or x-rays.
Certainly the shuttle or space station the astronaut is next to would be able to do better sensing and could relay the info to the astronaut, but there is something about having such a camera actually mounted on the person that seems attractive. For example it really would extend the human sense; it would function when the mother ship is out of commission, and could work in enclosed spaces, or even when indoors or on the ground.
Moonlight Mile talks about astronauts becoming acclimated to really living in space. Physically, they deal with low air pressure and the danger of incoming space shrapnel. Intellectually, they deal with the shock that comes with grasping the vastness of distances.
It seems such things as extenders for the human senses and can be a little advantage that makes the difference between survival and not, and certainly in space, it is advantageous to unlearn terrestrial rules of movement and thought sometimes it seems.
I think this is not just a thought exercise, it could be a valuable tool and it could even have uses on the ground. We would not think necessarily about it in the same way, for example a heads-up display that shows schematics for maintenance of aircraft is how Boeing used to see HUDs as far as I know. But a spectrum extender could give scientists or lots of other people the ability to pick up on cues from a human perspective that make it easier to notice changes in the environment and maybe gain an ah-hah insight. I bet a chef would love to try one out!
Yes, I understand. Clearly the problem is how to have your cake and eat it too. Of course if you *could* do it, it would be very cool. Maybe we should theorize an ideal computer that can access these amazing numbers, and then security is an exercise in approaching it.
Is the plain old factoring a large number problem the only answer? Could the power of a group of distributed systems together access higher security numbers for their collective security? Yes I understand unless you have the bits in your hand, you don't have the bits in your hand. But we can certainly download a megabyte of digits easily.
Well perhaps real infinities are so wild it is impossible to even theorize about being able to grab them, so I'd accept massive irrational or even finite floating point numbers. (Sorry I know I am not really fit to talk about these concepts.) I think a different method of managing port access cryptographically, or even just drastically increasing them, might be useful and am not a fan of knocking. Perhaps existing tech is enough if it is just applied to the problem.
I still wonder if there is something for us in higher maths that might open a window into much vaster spaces where it is difficult for others to go without our intentionally holding their hand. Certainly there is a problem with email addresses too, but they have to by memorizable by humans, or do they.
This may sound like tongue in cheek but I assure you I'm serious.
Clearly some aspects of computers not as sexy as high speed graphics lag behind, as some examples the number of bots, the number of ports, the number of concurrent connections (10K problem) and the data transfer speeds possible by consumer hardware, especially when divided by storage media size, all seem to be relatively small numbers still. A ton of bots can game this game, etc.
Obviously it is time to break out the heavy math. First imagine if instead of having only measly thousands of ports you could use a floating point number to designate a port. It's not like we have thousands of ports in hardware right? Meaning virtual port addressing. Needs a big botnet to get through that. You could make the system answer on any port, or only answer on those which are being used. Well floating point still may not have a lot of significant bits to hack, so time to break out the math.
I think Rudy Rucker could have some good ideas for computer security. Not that I'm a mathematician or anything, but if you read his latest book minus 1 there are plenty of descriptions of navigating infinities. If you had a transfinite number of ports I think you might even be able to prove that the obscurity is more secure than anything else in the real world. So while it is a bit of a ticklish idea I'd very much like to see a math-minded hacker think about what would be involved in designating such a number or abstract symbol representing it and using that as a destination address. Thank you.
And this is exactly what you get when you actually go out wanting to find life and look in the most obvious place. This is low-hanging fruit and hopefully a race will start to get some smart exploratory packages over there before we're dead.
Not having read TFA I can only guess. I've seen parabolic sound reflectors (kinda large) that operate from say a few stories away but 7 is a bit much I think. However I am aware of a technology that came out of MIT Media Lab several years ago and was initially aimed at museum displays, which IIRC used superimposed ultrasonic beams that resulted in audible sound in a given spot (and probably dogs going nuts).
Right. I suppose texting parents might be part of it but I was thinking more like, "Help!" It might be the only way for people stuck in a drowned city, or freezing without food, fuel or power somewhere might be able to actually talk to rescuers. I'd love to learn ham radio if I had the time and money, and maybe a cheap ham apparatus would be useful to get households to keep. Maybe ham as part of the equation. I just think people are more likely to have cell phones. You can get cheap chargers that use double a batteries too, so as long as the cell tower is powered and networked, you could probably call for help. It might be good for helping communities to help themselves too. No reason the infrastructure has to go out. I remember in the Kobe 1995 earthquake the net was up but everything else was down (maybe power was up though I don't remember well). Which is why the foreign language school was the place that told the world about it and then a Stanford undergrad organized it, and me and a lot of others mirrored it.
They should require some kind of ambient power generation also to be included. Solar cells are well understood perhaps but IIRC they do not have long lifetimes. So either some special long-lifetime solar cell, or something that uses environmental (humidity, electrostatic charge, temperature, gas, wind, etc.) gradients. It only has to be able to provide a very short window of time, perhaps only 30 min. per day, in which it can operate without any input from the power grid. If such a thing exists/can be developed it could be installed in really distant palces without infrastructure too, on an ad-hoc networking basis. I would feel a lot safer especially this would be useful for massive hurricaines and earthquakes, etc. I would not feel so safe if the backup batteries they talk about will run down in a few days, that's not enough time to restore all infrastructure as we have seen.
An option to receive microwave power from planes or from orbit would also be a very smart thing, a tiny rectenna (or just top surface of the battery) ought to do it.
I am not an expert on nuclear power, and though I am quite worried about environmental contamination by radioactive material I will just add some real data points to the discussion.
1. Having read many nuclear power plant operations inspection documents, I believe I can say that human error is quite common although if run by sane management who don't hire illiterate part-timers, then most such error is not very dangerous. But if you think all safety procedure is perfectly followed always, or that the physical parts (pipes, etc.) in a power plant don't end up mislabeled, confusing and sometimes rusted or leaking, well you're wrong. And sometimes there are total idiots allowed to handle this stuff because work is outsourced to other companies run by utter criminals, as demonstrated by actual recent accidents.
2. NIMBY is not "idiots who won't forget past mistakes" or even "idiots with boats". It is mostly people who are well aware that there will be contamination and maybe utter disaster. At least in Japan, where you have not only the above management and engineering problems, but also earthquakes and potential missile attack from China or North Korea to worry about.
3. I was at a talk recently and heard the president of TEPCO (a major Japanese electric power operator with nuclear reactors). He was seriously complaining about the press and how they never listen to facts. That seems correct. However even without worrying about #2 above #1 above provides plenty of incidents, both minor and major, to keep the home fire burning among those vociferous against nuclear power.
4. The president as mentioned above was talking at the 150th anniversary of Keio University. They are opening a new school for systems design, digital media, and hopefully as this guy was saying it can train new talented people who can understand human factors in engineering - they must have such people in the future for nuclear power plant design and there is not a single person like that who is really competent and working in his company... who would want to work there, he said in fact.
5. As a combination of my own reading of what it really is like to be observing worker teams in nuclear power plants, and also heavily based on this recent talk, I must conclude that nuclear power plants of the current design generation are far too complex, and also are made of materials that are far too weak, and the designs are prone to accidents. And sometimes work is done without a real safety framework solidly in place. It also seems that these plants are built on such a large scale, with so much tension, such difficulties in teaching new procedure, and generally such complex psychological issues that they really cannot be run perfectly safely.
That is, they are fine, if you are willing to accept little mishaps now and then, but they aren't 100% safe and can't be. Reading about it (sorry I know it is not 1st hand experience so perhaps this is hyperbole but..) it feels like the movie Brazil, a bureaucratic maze on a huge scale. Or paralleling the movie 2001 with people dwarfed by this huge machine they live in. I read about bead reactors once some years ago, and they sounded great. But whether they stand up or not there is a real problem, evidenced by human factors analysis I've seen and the talk of the top person in charge of managing this stuff in Japan as a business, and the whole system is full of pressures from the bottom up, including requiring absolute perfection from people over long term and from the top down, by economies that badly need nuclear power.
It would be nice if we had ultra resistant materials, perfect workers, and so on like in science fiction, and maybe nuclear power will be operated really safely by robots one day, but at the moment it seems to be a tough business and the tension about managing things that are radioactive gives every single aspect of the business a whole other axis of danger to be controlled. We may be up to it but I am not convinced that the capitalist system is the way to manage nuclear power. It looks like a bad idea.
I thought the same thing. But your name is spelled wrong unless flowers are beige (fluorescent..). Though quite cool and universe-colored.
(Waiting for my house o cards to tumble due to karma violation now)
Why the hell are bringing some racist into the story? Maybe he was smart enough to discover the helix once upon a time but I don't listen to that kind of crap anymore, sorry.
I think actually the Nigerians probably are more advanced because the scam mentality is very familiar from say growing up in New Jersey I mean the saying "That's such a scam" etc. is totally American. Maybe human even. Possibly people in other countries are less exposed to the net, or have the luxury of less visible scams, or they are offline like most used car dealers. But spammers are tricky enough to apply the same thinking to millions of people at once. This is the classic web marketing crap you see all over the net but taken to a slightly more vicious level I think. That's why I thought Nigeria must have a wierd mix of smart people, maybe corrupt government (I know nothing about it actually), very high access to the Net, and maybe they also either hate the West or make spamming it the national sport or something. I mean if I grew up there it might be really hilarious to that too, who knows.
Anyway I am NOT talking about race at all. If anything the Nigerians are very likely much smarter than the U.S. since while I know next to nothing about them at least they don't actually work to make their lives a Bushian "shades of World War III" where they are hated by the world, targeted by a holy war, etc. Probably if the continent just got some decent Internet access, water, and fuel, and less genocidal maniacs in charge they could do great things. I'm just wondering why nobody else seems to have picked up on Internet scams as a funny way (to them) to bootstrap the economy or whatever it does. Actually I don't think I've received more than one all caps Nigerian-style scam (don't know where from) this year so I assume those people all graduated from the doh skool of scamming and now hire botnets from teenagers in Russia or somewhere. Seriously.
I know Nigeria has tons of really smart people but is it something about their government or educational system that warps them? Or is it prejudicial media that gives special attention to anything with the word Nigeria in it? I can't figure it. It's as if Microsoft (insert other evil corporate America name here here) and organized crime are the two organizations that have an insane ratio of dibs on Nigerian brain cells. I know there are real smart Nigerians because I've met them, but for some reason we keep seeing all these wierd "Nigerian" scams (maybe even if they aren't from there). Is life cheap there, or do people get rewarded for thinking in crafty ways that would make a lawyer blush? I remember once talking to an Indian friend (who was high up in Apple) and he told me that he treats business like a game, and that everybody back home did that. (Which might explain part of why India's so good at taking over IT maybe). I'm curious because you know, these OLPCs are meant to train kids but maybe they also could teach a common global OLPCkids attitude (you don't have to call it morality or cultural imperialism it could be just a chat etiquette even). Hopefully these kids will grow up to become world leaders and build fine businesses or paint beautiful paintings. It would be nice if communications brought us closer together and we can stop spamming each other with patent crap, drm, eulas and a thousand and one other crazy bureaucratic tricks that just multiply faster like virulent organisms when they go digital. Oh well, even Intel etc. show they just can't leave well enough alone and let OLPCs succeed without throwing in a monkey wrench. I hope this rant convinces some smart kids in nigeria to hit those guys with the next spamsuit.
Here is a series of terms. Do we add, subtract, multiply, or divide them?
TFA is in a locked site so nobody can comment on it. MP3 made sense in the last generation of technology, no longer does it make sense to embrace it. Buying an album always is waiting for the other shoe to drop - which is the good song in it?
An album of filler is to a lossy MP3 of a great performance, as a subscription-only website is to which of the following: a. TFA b. Record industry profits c. Slashverbowling c. CowboyNeal d. All of the above
Presumably this is talking about distant supernovae, I think one is 7.7 billion years old and a couple wer 5 billion years old. In other words halfway back to the Big Bang.
The suggestion of TFA is that no sentient creature has ever observed these supernovae in the past 5-7 billion years and along comes humanity, which in its first decades of being able to view distant supernovae are now responsible for a horrible cosmic crime. Of course this does suggest another rotten potential reason behind the Fermi paradox, that a quantum reality reason could be why we don't see other sentient beings, but it seems far more likely, even if the interpretation of the scientist in TFA is correct, that we are not the first race to see those supernovae, nor the only race to be watching it in the past million years even.
It has got to be amazing hubris to suggest that of all the countless galaxies in the universe that could be home to life able to view these supernovae, that we are the only people around in the past five billion years to see it. To say this guy's ego is big, is the ultimate understatement. Must be fun to think you are the smartest guy in the universe.
Slashdot Mirror
I would just like to say that while I have not used either extensively yet, I have accounts on Linode.com and Hostgator.com and both have given me free upgrades since signup.
I quit my old company because not only were they incompetent, they also turned out to be charging me premium rates for what was now less than their lowest level package.
Seeing this thread I checked Hostgator and glory be, 600GB of storage space where there only used to be IIRC 200GB.
Matt
My first reaction was "then don't use Hotmail". But actually while I abhor MS and use Gmail, I'd prefer MS fixes their service to work with Firefox.
I find Gmail to be sub-par considering that it is generates income via ads.
In particular:
no folders
no way to color items to come back to them (other than set to unread status, or starring them - heck Macs have had color labels since forever)
inability to search on partial names (of email addresses; I have a client named r.ueda@xxxxx and cannot search for "ueda" only "r.ueda".)
and search system in general sucks considering how many search experts they have on board. they could do a heck of a lot more.
inability to email phones of the largest Japanese phone company (have had people tell me Japanese is corrupted when emailed from them, but corporate email works fine - they probably just need to encode correctly and assume phones don't do UTF8 I expect)
spam system needs work (better at least than what yahoo used to have. but if 10,000 people get the same spam they should call it black spam, while if their filter picks up a client of mine and says probably spam they should mark it light-grey or green spam. Then let me filter/search with a color wheel).
limited visualization
limited user initiated spam filtering
no way to indicate important clients (who should show up at top in red I think)
very confusing how to find where to submit reports
other things..
I have contacted google about a couple issues, such as the phone issue which was NOT resolved. In general I find they are incapable of actually conducting a discussion with a user or saying they are not perfect. And I hate to say this since I like Google.
Anyway I would like to see Google have real competition so they are forced to maintain and improve their own service, rather than only get the benefit of MS' stupid lock-in strategies and not real competition. Maybe MS buying Yahoo will keep google on their toes?
NO no no. I live in Japan fuck off what are you talking about? No need to be rude.
The commonly accepted standard is YYYY X M X D X where the X's are kanji characters. These are translated into dot notation commonly. It works in descending order which makes sense.
I am not aware of any Europeans who use year first. The ambiguity to which you refer is due to the difference in order M-D or D-M used when writing out the full month name in the western world. I submit that by using a dot notation it is simpler and more logical.
You do not write your IP address backwards do you? No. You write in progressively smaller magnitude groups, the same way as the decimal system works, another successful international standard. Of course dyslexics are screwed but if you must remove place signifiers at least YYYY.MM.DD makes the most sense, especially on the net.
Someone mentioned sponges. I was thinking along a different line, that if you have a long thin straw especially if the reservoir is stiff maybe it is hard to suck it out. So if you had more openings at the mouth end it would multiply the ease with which you could extract liquid (or is it really just herding barely connected globules into the air floating in the middle of the ribbon, in which case not so hard).
This kind of a tree-like network could be three dimensional, like a rock or well a shower head you stick in your mouth. (Maybe more the size of a thumb, but with holes all over it) and connected to a thin tube that is coiled up, or maybe inserted into a pouch. Or you could do it two-dimensionally, a series of flat tubes that branch like a tree, and then roll that up into a cone (not a hollow cone, more like a stromboli, so it ends with a solid looking spiral of compressed pipe-paper with all the open ends towards the mouth. This might cut the mouth if it isn't made of soft material though.
Of course not knowing the real issues this could be useless, but if you did have a vessel containing liquid that was not automatically deforming (or it deforms but not so much), then you could accept making it hard to extract the liquid if you also have a system like this shower head drink nozzle that hydraulically magnifies your ability to suck the liquid out. You might even be able to pinch it closed and then when you open it the liquid pours out naturally. This wouldn't work with drinks that have globs of things in it.
There also is a thing that's a hit on the streets, it's tapioca cubes in ice tea, in a plastic cup sealed with a plastic membrane lid. You stick a very wide straw into it through the lid. Possibly this would work in orbit especially if you could include a cloth spiral inside the straw and curve (coil) the straw once to force globules to follow the path.
There are less young people going into farming these days. These suits will be good for aging farmers as well as maybe making it less backbreaking or more interesting to young people I'd think too.
Of course the real robotic farmer that can plant rice by himself? I dunno, the Emperor does that himself you know, can the robot really plant delicious rice? Rice has a spiritual place in Japanese religion too.
But my guess is this would be an excellent way to really test robots in the field especially when you aren't supposed to be military really.
That's also the standard in Japan, but with periods: 2008.01.15
which sanity is erased by common use of imperial reign (this is year Heisei 20).
Matt
I may be mixing this though with the manga PLANETES (written in cyrillic) which features dodging debris in orbit.
Matt
There are plenty of poor kids outside Alabama too. Could be seen by some as giving sub-par systems to poor kids but as they actually are very high-tech, just maybe not your fiery game machine, this could even be seen as an advantage. Smart kids in the U.S. could have input into a national/global education system based on free software and free courseware. I can't see it going anywhere but up.
Obviously it's worth it. Here's an example I just thought of. I was thinking of actually being an astronaut in orbit doing work in outer space. I haven't thought from this perspective in maybe a year, and that was when I was reading an excellent manga on space exploration, Moonlight Mile.
I was thinking that when robots are in space or say on Mars they look at different bands of electromagnetic radiation than humans do. They are more likely to have a couple of bands of infrared than red, on Mars apparently. But space is where you push the envelope. It would at least be neat, and would seem useful, if astronaut's helmets could have integral cameras and other sensors that serve to extend the amount of spectrum visible to them. (Maybe they have it, but I never heard of it so far.)
By using the helmet as a heads-up display, or possibly just painting the retina with a laser, it would be possible to overlay what the scene ahead looks like in infrared, ultraviolet, or perhaps radar or x-rays.
Certainly the shuttle or space station the astronaut is next to would be able to do better sensing and could relay the info to the astronaut, but there is something about having such a camera actually mounted on the person that seems attractive. For example it really would extend the human sense; it would function when the mother ship is out of commission, and could work in enclosed spaces, or even when indoors or on the ground.
Moonlight Mile talks about astronauts becoming acclimated to really living in space. Physically, they deal with low air pressure and the danger of incoming space shrapnel. Intellectually, they deal with the shock that comes with grasping the vastness of distances.
It seems such things as extenders for the human senses and can be a little advantage that makes the difference between survival and not, and certainly in space, it is advantageous to unlearn terrestrial rules of movement and thought sometimes it seems.
I think this is not just a thought exercise, it could be a valuable tool and it could even have uses on the ground. We would not think necessarily about it in the same way, for example a heads-up display that shows schematics for maintenance of aircraft is how Boeing used to see HUDs as far as I know. But a spectrum extender could give scientists or lots of other people the ability to pick up on cues from a human perspective that make it easier to notice changes in the environment and maybe gain an ah-hah insight. I bet a chef would love to try one out!
Yes, I understand. Clearly the problem is how to have your cake and eat it too. Of course if you *could* do it, it would be very cool. Maybe we should theorize an ideal computer that can access these amazing numbers, and then security is an exercise in approaching it.
Is the plain old factoring a large number problem the only answer? Could the power of a group of distributed systems together access higher security numbers for their collective security? Yes I understand unless you have the bits in your hand, you don't have the bits in your hand. But we can certainly download a megabyte of digits easily.
Well perhaps real infinities are so wild it is impossible to even theorize about being able to grab them, so I'd accept massive irrational or even finite floating point numbers. (Sorry I know I am not really fit to talk about these concepts.) I think a different method of managing port access cryptographically, or even just drastically increasing them, might be useful and am not a fan of knocking. Perhaps existing tech is enough if it is just applied to the problem.
I still wonder if there is something for us in higher maths that might open a window into much vaster spaces where it is difficult for others to go without our intentionally holding their hand. Certainly there is a problem with email addresses too, but they have to by memorizable by humans, or do they.
This may sound like tongue in cheek but I assure you I'm serious.
Clearly some aspects of computers not as sexy as high speed graphics lag behind, as some examples the number of bots, the number of ports, the number of concurrent connections (10K problem) and the data transfer speeds possible by consumer hardware, especially when divided by storage media size, all seem to be relatively small numbers still. A ton of bots can game this game, etc.
Obviously it is time to break out the heavy math. First imagine if instead of having only measly thousands of ports you could use a floating point number to designate a port. It's not like we have thousands of ports in hardware right? Meaning virtual port addressing. Needs a big botnet to get through that. You could make the system answer on any port, or only answer on those which are being used. Well floating point still may not have a lot of significant bits to hack, so time to break out the math.
I think Rudy Rucker could have some good ideas for computer security. Not that I'm a mathematician or anything, but if you read his latest book minus 1 there are plenty of descriptions of navigating infinities. If you had a transfinite number of ports I think you might even be able to prove that the obscurity is more secure than anything else in the real world. So while it is a bit of a ticklish idea I'd very much like to see a math-minded hacker think about what would be involved in designating such a number or abstract symbol representing it and using that as a destination address. Thank you.
Finally a plausible reason why JM is conceivable.
And this is exactly what you get when you actually go out wanting to find life and look in the most obvious place. This is low-hanging fruit and hopefully a race will start to get some smart exploratory packages over there before we're dead.
Not having read TFA I can only guess. I've seen parabolic sound reflectors (kinda large) that operate from say a few stories away but 7 is a bit much I think. However I am aware of a technology that came out of MIT Media Lab several years ago and was initially aimed at museum displays, which IIRC used superimposed ultrasonic beams that resulted in audible sound in a given spot (and probably dogs going nuts).
They neglected to mention the close monitoring of the way figures strangely fail to come to the expected sum on bills in chintzy Italian restaurants.
This omission leads me to believe they are partially funded from a mysterious cabal, hence the secrecy about that bit.
Thanks for the reply and sorry to be late.
I knew solar cells lasted around 20 years, it is good to hear they last longer.
If they operate okay in 25 years that's fine.
But if they have to be replaced every 20-30 years that isn't so good, infrastructre should last longer.
Matt
Right. I suppose texting parents might be part of it but I was thinking more like, "Help!" It might be the only way for people stuck in a drowned city, or freezing without food, fuel or power somewhere might be able to actually talk to rescuers. I'd love to learn ham radio if I had the time and money, and maybe a cheap ham apparatus would be useful to get households to keep. Maybe ham as part of the equation. I just think people are more likely to have cell phones. You can get cheap chargers that use double a batteries too, so as long as the cell tower is powered and networked, you could probably call for help. It might be good for helping communities to help themselves too. No reason the infrastructure has to go out. I remember in the Kobe 1995 earthquake the net was up but everything else was down (maybe power was up though I don't remember well). Which is why the foreign language school was the place that told the world about it and then a Stanford undergrad organized it, and me and a lot of others mirrored it.
They should require some kind of ambient power generation also to be included. Solar cells are well understood perhaps but IIRC they do not have long lifetimes. So either some special long-lifetime solar cell, or something that uses environmental (humidity, electrostatic charge, temperature, gas, wind, etc.) gradients. It only has to be able to provide a very short window of time, perhaps only 30 min. per day, in which it can operate without any input from the power grid. If such a thing exists/can be developed it could be installed in really distant palces without infrastructure too, on an ad-hoc networking basis. I would feel a lot safer especially this would be useful for massive hurricaines and earthquakes, etc. I would not feel so safe if the backup batteries they talk about will run down in a few days, that's not enough time to restore all infrastructure as we have seen.
An option to receive microwave power from planes or from orbit would also be a very smart thing, a tiny rectenna (or just top surface of the battery) ought to do it.
I am not an expert on nuclear power, and though I am quite worried about environmental contamination by radioactive material I will just add some real data points to the discussion.
1. Having read many nuclear power plant operations inspection documents, I believe I can say that human error is quite common although if run by sane management who don't hire illiterate part-timers, then most such error is not very dangerous. But if you think all safety procedure is perfectly followed always, or that the physical parts (pipes, etc.) in a power plant don't end up mislabeled, confusing and sometimes rusted or leaking, well you're wrong. And sometimes there are total idiots allowed to handle this stuff because work is outsourced to other companies run by utter criminals, as demonstrated by actual recent accidents.
2. NIMBY is not "idiots who won't forget past mistakes" or even "idiots with boats". It is mostly people who are well aware that there will be contamination and maybe utter disaster. At least in Japan, where you have not only the above management and engineering problems, but also earthquakes and potential missile attack from China or North Korea to worry about.
3. I was at a talk recently and heard the president of TEPCO (a major Japanese electric power operator with nuclear reactors). He was seriously complaining about the press and how they never listen to facts. That seems correct. However even without worrying about #2 above #1 above provides plenty of incidents, both minor and major, to keep the home fire burning among those vociferous against nuclear power.
4. The president as mentioned above was talking at the 150th anniversary of Keio University. They are opening a new school for systems design, digital media, and hopefully as this guy was saying it can train new talented people who can understand human factors in engineering - they must have such people in the future for nuclear power plant design and there is not a single person like that who is really competent and working in his company... who would want to work there, he said in fact.
5. As a combination of my own reading of what it really is like to be observing worker teams in nuclear power plants, and also heavily based on this recent talk, I must conclude that nuclear power plants of the current design generation are far too complex, and also are made of materials that are far too weak, and the designs are prone to accidents. And sometimes work is done without a real safety framework solidly in place. It also seems that these plants are built on such a large scale, with so much tension, such difficulties in teaching new procedure, and generally such complex psychological issues that they really cannot be run perfectly safely.
That is, they are fine, if you are willing to accept little mishaps now and then, but they aren't 100% safe and can't be. Reading about it (sorry I know it is not 1st hand experience so perhaps this is hyperbole but..) it feels like the movie Brazil, a bureaucratic maze on a huge scale. Or paralleling the movie 2001 with people dwarfed by this huge machine they live in. I read about bead reactors once some years ago, and they sounded great. But whether they stand up or not there is a real problem, evidenced by human factors analysis I've seen and the talk of the top person in charge of managing this stuff in Japan as a business, and the whole system is full of pressures from the bottom up, including requiring absolute perfection from people over long term and from the top down, by economies that badly need nuclear power.
It would be nice if we had ultra resistant materials, perfect workers, and so on like in science fiction, and maybe nuclear power will be operated really safely by robots one day, but at the moment it seems to be a tough business and the tension about managing things that are radioactive gives every single aspect of the business a whole other axis of danger to be controlled. We may be up to it but I am not convinced that the capitalist system is the way to manage nuclear power. It looks like a bad idea.
I thought the same thing. But your name is spelled wrong unless flowers are beige (fluorescent..). Though quite cool and universe-colored.
(Waiting for my house o cards to tumble due to karma violation now)
WHAT!?!?!?
Why the hell are bringing some racist into the story? Maybe he was smart enough to discover the helix once upon a time but I don't listen to that kind of crap anymore, sorry.
I think actually the Nigerians probably are more advanced because the scam mentality is very familiar from say growing up in New Jersey I mean the saying "That's such a scam" etc. is totally American. Maybe human even. Possibly people in other countries are less exposed to the net, or have the luxury of less visible scams, or they are offline like most used car dealers. But spammers are tricky enough to apply the same thinking to millions of people at once. This is the classic web marketing crap you see all over the net but taken to a slightly more vicious level I think. That's why I thought Nigeria must have a wierd mix of smart people, maybe corrupt government (I know nothing about it actually), very high access to the Net, and maybe they also either hate the West or make spamming it the national sport or something. I mean if I grew up there it might be really hilarious to that too, who knows.
Anyway I am NOT talking about race at all. If anything the Nigerians are very likely much smarter than the U.S. since while I know next to nothing about them at least they don't actually work to make their lives a Bushian "shades of World War III" where they are hated by the world, targeted by a holy war, etc. Probably if the continent just got some decent Internet access, water, and fuel, and less genocidal maniacs in charge they could do great things. I'm just wondering why nobody else seems to have picked up on Internet scams as a funny way (to them) to bootstrap the economy or whatever it does. Actually I don't think I've received more than one all caps Nigerian-style scam (don't know where from) this year so I assume those people all graduated from the doh skool of scamming and now hire botnets from teenagers in Russia or somewhere. Seriously.
> The pilot reminded me not to talk about it too much
Then why post it to Slashdot MichaelSmith?
I know Nigeria has tons of really smart people but is it something about their government or educational system that warps them? Or is it prejudicial media that gives special attention to anything with the word Nigeria in it? I can't figure it. It's as if Microsoft (insert other evil corporate America name here here) and organized crime are the two organizations that have an insane ratio of dibs on Nigerian brain cells. I know there are real smart Nigerians because I've met them, but for some reason we keep seeing all these wierd "Nigerian" scams (maybe even if they aren't from there). Is life cheap there, or do people get rewarded for thinking in crafty ways that would make a lawyer blush? I remember once talking to an Indian friend (who was high up in Apple) and he told me that he treats business like a game, and that everybody back home did that. (Which might explain part of why India's so good at taking over IT maybe). I'm curious because you know, these OLPCs are meant to train kids but maybe they also could teach a common global OLPCkids attitude (you don't have to call it morality or cultural imperialism it could be just a chat etiquette even). Hopefully these kids will grow up to become world leaders and build fine businesses or paint beautiful paintings. It would be nice if communications brought us closer together and we can stop spamming each other with patent crap, drm, eulas and a thousand and one other crazy bureaucratic tricks that just multiply faster like virulent organisms when they go digital. Oh well, even Intel etc. show they just can't leave well enough alone and let OLPCs succeed without throwing in a monkey wrench. I hope this rant convinces some smart kids in nigeria to hit those guys with the next spamsuit.
Here is a series of terms. Do we add, subtract, multiply, or divide them?
TFA is in a locked site so nobody can comment on it.
MP3 made sense in the last generation of technology, no longer does it make sense to embrace it.
Buying an album always is waiting for the other shoe to drop - which is the good song in it?
An album of filler is to a lossy MP3 of a great performance,
as a subscription-only website is to which of the following:
a. TFA
b. Record industry profits
c. Slashverbowling
c. CowboyNeal
d. All of the above
Presumably this is talking about distant supernovae, I think one is 7.7 billion years old and a couple wer 5 billion years old. In other words halfway back to the Big Bang.
The suggestion of TFA is that no sentient creature has ever observed these supernovae in the past 5-7 billion years and along comes humanity, which in its first decades of being able to view distant supernovae are now responsible for a horrible cosmic crime. Of course this does suggest another rotten potential reason behind the Fermi paradox, that a quantum reality reason could be why we don't see other sentient beings, but it seems far more likely, even if the interpretation of the scientist in TFA is correct, that we are not the first race to see those supernovae, nor the only race to be watching it in the past million years even.
It has got to be amazing hubris to suggest that of all the countless galaxies in the universe that could be home to life able to view these supernovae, that we are the only people around in the past five billion years to see it. To say this guy's ego is big, is the ultimate understatement. Must be fun to think you are the smartest guy in the universe.