I submitted a story to Slashdot yesterday (declined) about Sony's announcement of peripherals tacked on to the end of Memory Sticks like thin Pez heads. On TV in Tokyo they showed last night a teeny little GPS antenna the size of your pinky fingernail, clock, ccd camera, and microphone, all in the same form factor. Apparently this Memory Stick Duo series is going to provide a common serial interface across widely different consumer items, from an Aibo to a camera, to headphones, to your wristwatch, they said. Maybe a firewire or infrared connection will make networking easier..
Wonderful effort, you got as much as you could expect from them at this point. Further gains on this front will only come when a connection between market growth and the value system you expounded can be demonstrated to Pinkerton.
This is EXACTLY what Neil Stephenson meant when he suggested injustices done by corporations were more important targets than Big Brother's own spying.
I believe Slashdot power can be harnessed by first building a simple site with a database of email, phone, fax, and mailing address of every school board representative and member of state or government legislature. Visitors would input their state, compose a letter in an online form, and have the site send it to the appropriate people. *Maybe* Andover could pay for bulk snail mail of letters to offline representatives. This is the easy part. Physical mail is more effective, so offer the database to people who want to write snail mail themselves.
The magnification comes from requiring journalists who ask about the campaign to print the full URL of the site (and fax number or mailing address if Andover is willing) in their own articles, broadcasts, or interviews with you. Viewers of these articles who don't read Slashdot will see an available outlet for the indignant impulse, and you will also build a library of anti-Pinkerton email. CNN, AOL and other services also might be asked to carry a link in related articles. Also require writers who cover the site to send copies of their articles to you and post them on the site as well.
If you can also personally answer all email sent to you through the site, you should be able to develop an even more powerful feedback loop and gain real allies. I did a project like this before. It took a few years and it will certainly take a lot of your time, probably for no pay.. but it will work to the degree that you put energy into it. You might also be able to serially publish in online and offline venues constructive criticism amassed from non-tech types through the site, this would provide magnification of brainpower, not just a simple multiplication of email.
Personally I was bullied too, and had to change school districts twice: once out of private school in the first grade, after my parents won a court case against the school, next back to private school after eighth grade (due to physical danger and shittiness of the public school). I had an incredibly supportive family and enough money to commute 45 minutes each way to an expensive private high school, and was very lucky.. it changed my life. But this experience tells me there would have to be a tidal wave of lawsuits like the very difficult one my own family won, to stop Pinkerton after untold damage was done. Much better for everyone if it could be fought out in the media ahead of time.
Here's my experience rushing from Gimp relaive newbie to Perl-Fu acolyte (not quite black belt that's for sure) on a deadline, in under two weeks. This tells me if someone is willing to keep an eye on a critical Gimp installation it's probably worth it..
After a lot of struggle with Gimp (an old beta which undoubtedly was half the stability problem) I was able to build a Perl based compositing system and generate a thousand html pages and as many gifs and jpegs (with alpha masked, highlited thumbnails), using Perl-Fu to do repetitive operations and other Perl programs to rip representative layouts into templates and also to generate the pages with the right hypertext references (a db wasn't allowed). The data was a couple of CDs worth of Photoshop files (which I had to hand rip from layers into jpegs since many designers had worked on it) for 12 hotels.
It was all done from scratch in less than two weeks, and though I might have saved time using deBabelizer (I realized after I was hip deep in it) I ended up with some cool semiautomatic tools. The justification was that despite a very short deadline, changes were coming in from the client constantly. The volume was just enough (and my carpal tunnel looking scary enough) that I wanted to make it work badly. In particular new photos could be dropped into the source directory and a new site could build itself in about two minutes for page generation and two minutes for resizing and thumbnail generation. on a 450MHz PIII (Dell Inspiron laptop). Watching all the little windows open up and save themselves was honestly, a blast!
Some problems that I experienced were inability to open some seemingly good Photoshop files, 4-layer jpegs couldn't load, some functions I thought ought to work didn't, and other little bugs and crashes (the crashes were soft and quick). The biggest annoyance was Gimp's refusal to open dialog boxes on top of the main workspace, but this was not a Perl-Fu problem. Lots of time was taken with giving up on Scheme, figuring out how Perl-Fu worked, and adding fixes, like different numbers of thumbnails for different sections, preparing layout template code, deciphering strange source files from the designers, and automatically dealing with vertically oriented images.
This is great for when you have a ton of processing work, but if you want to run it from CGI or cron and don't have the author watching over the system I'd recommend very tightly limiting the kinds of operations you do with it, and watch the output. It might be very good for adding new images to a database-backed site.
If you want to experiment for a similar use as I did I recommend not trying to use scheme since you don't know what's going on, and start with running little programlets in perl, e.g. I modified the pgshell program so I could past a whole block from my processing programs into a buffer that would run it so I could test procedures.
On the other hand maybe this site is good advertising for Gimp stability.. at the very least with 40 processes they might handle the/. effect better than your own multitasked server.
I'm guessing rotation could be measured with a radio, maybe some doppler thing (heck Arecibo is listening at 1 Ghz).
Terahertz is molecular rotation range, but also microwave frequency.. If you hang an organometallic functional group off the side, or just do anything electrical at that rate, wouldn't this become a little microwave broadcasting station? Not sure I want to use a computer with a microwave bus without my lead-lined undershorts and sweatband. Or might spinning structure in a magnetic field act like an antenna and charge up the substrate with static charge..
I find things like ftp or java sessions running inside an MS-DOS window in Window$ 98 run a *lot* faster if you twirl the mouse cursor around real fast in circles over the Dos Window..
I know a guy who has been working on nanotech for real products. Apparently the first realistic uses of the stuff is as thin films.. the soonest apparently may be a carbon tubule based lubricant for hard drives, which lets the head skate over the medium. Problems include toxicity of the stuff plus difficulty in quality control but it ain't impossible. Covered in the article? dunno, slashdotted.
That's not really a lot of memory since it still uses terms we can pronounce to describe it.
Figure instead that this is a crystal ball and find out what year it is to be available with serious transfer rates.
At that time,
- All AOL's forums are digital video only viewable from Netscape 16 (forked away from Mozilla) - RIAA distributes DVD quality music videos of the top 100 singles weekly in throwaway chips like those AOL CD's people get in the mail these days ("a great loss leader") with 2048 bit SDMI encoded in the hardware controller. - Sony's Playstation V, having broken another sales record, is issued a recall since someone found a secret password for the test screen which renders SDMI useless! Oh Shit! - Tons of encrypted software comes with tons more of free interactive ads and spam is a fond memory. - Transmeta slates, which allow you to plug these memory chips into thin little bays inset all around the edges, will directly connect to fiber in public spaces (spread spectrum that can handle the bandwidth will fry your zygotes in a flash) - Micro$oft still sux but who gives a shit. Bill sez "the consumer is happier now than every before" etc. - You set the deSDMI chip emulator in your slate to the public key signature of the viral FiL3Z band which infects the omnipresent fiber net, dial up your favorite virtual file system (not FreeNet since they all got arrested in early 2001) and download today's news plus the latest RIAA password. Andover has been bought out by CNet and the original Slashdot crew (fired though some were coopted by the new owners) run (virtually) for the data havens where they can broadcast Geeks in Space in peace. - As an afterthought you turn over extra computing power to the daily RIAA decryption effort. Having seen it was finished hours ago (someone in the quantum chip labs in Switzerland have been playing around over coffee break) you turn it to the distributed Seti project, having the last year of raw observatory data in an auxiliary bay. There are a couple inexplicable Wow events on the charts but more processing is needed.. - Hackers and mainstream couch potatoes incredibly unite against AOL and steal the keys to the data stream. Artists get rich from direct payments from advertisers, and with TimeWarner going down the tubes AOL is looking for an exit strategy. - Programmers are working feverishly within the GPL liscense to support the latest quantum computing hardware (for the first time Linux may support this hardware before any OS). The only problem is when the chip delves into other universes during a computation the subjectivity breaks; it keeps finding references to OS's by Linus' parallel twin sister Eunice (who makes her own wild Mozilla skins) and strangely enough.. hot grits? - World domination at last. Who won? Doh.
I seem to remember micrograph photos of the garnet based bubble memory showing units shaped like the letter "L", which sequestered small magnetic domains that could be moved. Donuts were the old iron ferrite core memories. Which you access by wires.
The new stuff sounds like charge is neither moved nor accessed by wires, though the donut shape seems to be very good at holding a magnetic charge, or maybe they just shoot the charge through donut holes to reach the bottom one.. a little vague in the story.
The guys who made a drive out of a roll of scotch tape figure they can write to all the layers of scotch tape at once, for a holographic memory or multichannel movie.
By the way studio types would constantly freak when checking out the system, and the biggest problem really was explaining to them all the things that you could do with this kind of nonlinear nonrestricted system. A conceptual barrier more than any. Maybe not a problem in your market.
I've seen a Mac based system used for broadcast quality work. Premiere and After Effects were the main software, but you can use anything to draw frames. A separate tower built with a bunch of fast hard disks striping for speed handled live recording and playback. A beta deck is needed for commercial work but quality wise DV is very close.
Basically you show people your work, they say let's change this, you do it while they stare over your shoulder, then you hit render, and let the guys fall asleep on the couch. Video can be fully on disk or part on tape. Extremely cost effective even on an 8400 Mac, though G4 is what you would want now 30 gigs will disappear in a flash, get yourself dat backup. Get a mixing board for music input or maybe you could do it on the Mac.
There were some problems with Premiere that could crash the system if you touch files that Premiere is working with, but this kind of interactivity and customizability is a new thing.. the only problem being that studio types and operators also are used to Avid.
Biggest bitches seem to be the need to replace hard drives when they die (apparently 3-4 months sometimes), and also dealing with video card manufacturer.. a very expensive video card is important. These two points mean that you need to have some knowledge of hardware.
Thank you very much for giving time to my questions, though sorry to say I am very disappointed with your response.
Since you did not answer them directly I would like to clarify. Personally I am excited by the possibilities of Freenet, and maybe it is all a race against time after all. But your responses seemed too easy.. and oblique. In other words, you are not a superstar.. yet.
By thrasher bots I meant to suggest a distributed attack by bots living on servers around the world, close to major network centers, or perhaps virtual hosted/hacked into otherwise high traffic Freenet servers. Obviously I read your FAQ before posting.. doh. Can we be a little more patronizing please?
The question was, how about dividing Freenet resources between volatile 100% FR33 files and nonvolatile files which are not subject to the popularity requirement (their disk space might be managed by a group of civil liberty proponents, or publicly). The closest post to this question is the one about pro-life advocates committing murder through the Freenet.
About divulging the names of the first wave of sysadmins, this had to do with the People and Mailing Lists sections on your site, not with inform.php. Email addresses are visible in many documents. You act as if you are operating in a safe environment. I realized you may want to stay in the open, and without talent this project would die. Maybe cyperpunks could use remailers.. but current developers' full names and email addresses are listed there and the FBI or NSA probably knows their street addresses by now. Mr Freeh (if he still is in office) could wait a little while until some user (or agent perhaps) posted a bunch of copyrighted software on Freenet and then start threatening people. Developers would already know about the possibility of misuse and might be held responsible or threatened, based on the personal identity information skimmed from your site. I'm suggesting that in time you could wish you had spent more time on security in the beginning. If you do have some security you should tell people about it, for now it seems to be glossed over. Open Source is not the place to try being safe through obscurity.
As for selling on the Freenet I don't think this necessitates "missing the point [you] are making". If a repressive government discovered Freenet they could make a death penalty for hosting a server (just call the sysadmin a hacker and have him be Chinese). This would not happen if the "New Economy" became in part dependent on Freenet. Bootleg software is not welcomed by software companies so this is not a good product. For example, the only obvious reasons why China is listening to the U.S. about rights at all are economic (WTO, Taiwan, U.S. barriers, etc.). Economics (and also building up the ego) is a point of leverage with these regimes. And who knows? You could say Freenet is the Communist dream, and get funding from the Chinese government! You seem to think this will automatically seep everywhere it is needed and that you will not be fighting a battle and this will be a problem.
Take a look at NTT (Japan's historical telephone monopoly). They tried to kill the Internet for decades in Japan (I know, I started one of the first few providers in 1994 riding on AT&T's liscense). Now they have been broken up and as of May 2000, they are being forced to cut prices in half with the champion of that being Sony's President Idei. Meanwhile Sony has announced they are starting an online bank. This is possible because of the billions made by Softbank off Yahoo recently in the middle of an otherwise dismal Japanese economy.. NTT has been holding back not only the Internet but also the economy.
About your coming trials.. I built www.northkorea.org for a Newsweek bureau chief (Bernie Krisher), a volunteer site dedicated to buying food and medicine with money donated through the Internet. We attracted a quarter million dollars, mainly due I think to this man's heroism (he suffered a stroke and heart trouble, once hospitalized in North Korea actually) and the many newspaper and TV runs we were able to engineer. While in the end the project got positive recognition by the U.S. government, the U.S. bank account was frozen and several times Bernie's political expertise was needed to navigate the waters. At one point he consulted a top legal mind at the U.N. he knew about potential liability but his "Damn the torpedos" stubborness succeeded. Mind you, Bernie is a world famous journalist in his 70s, had a humanitarian project, and had information from colleagues and the World Food Program that things were much worse than the North Koreans were letting on.
If Freenet became a conduit for sensitive technologies to Iraq for example, freezing your bank account will be the least of your worries.
You may want to bring some of the freedom felt on the old Internet, but you cannot roll back the clock. The world has changed and you ignore this at your peril. Or are you ignoring Hotline in an attempt to be able to claim innocence later on? Heck do you even have a lawyer on this? Is it legal to work on this project in America? Considering the mishmash of changing laws you could easily be leading a lot of people into trouble. I would be surprised if you do not get a lawsuit from someone soon.
These dangers could be alleviated by attention to working within current notions of copyright, be it transcopyright or some other animal. We don't live in a post-copyright world, sorry that is your own meaningless wordplay and it makes you look dumb while being irrelevant to your stated goals. Propose a better way for people to ensure attribution and recompensation for labor in the digital world yourself if you feel up to it.
Perhaps Freenet could become a substrate for other ecommerce efforts, maybe Xanadu+microcash or something else. Maybe if you just want to do programming you can try to leave the coming fight to someone else. But free information is both anathema to all governments as well as an ideal for which some strive. Considering growth and security strategies (for Freenet and for the developer team) based on how the world works today might be important enough to think about sooner than later. I'm not saying you can handle it alone. Why not talk to the EFF and get some more brainpower and experience on these problems.
IMNSHO if you are honest about preserving freedom in repressed societies you should become a virus writer, climb into a hole somewhere, and build your own freenet with heavy encryption and bandwidth limits (easier to stash and warez-unfriendly), and without all this bullshit. It'll take you a lot farther and keep you safe, ignorant, and dangerous (in an infectious sense), which is what you want, right?
P.S. I think Islands in the Net is a great book too. Read it. It talks not about a null future but one in which enlightened individuals rise to positions in enlightened organizations where they can leverage resources against the bad guys and that includes money. More realistic than your own novel.. though the fragility of personal security jibes well.
Bid starts at.. 1M/yr cnet.tv (owns tv.com) 1M/yr msn.tv 1M/yr sex.tv 500K/yr mtv.tv 50K/yr porn.tv 50K/yr linux.tv 27K/yr i.tv 25K/yr m.tv 25K/yr ms.tv (should someone buy this??) 20K/yr wrestling.tv 11K/yr n.tv 10K/yr zd.tv (a good deal??) 4K/yr opensource.tv (silly.. doh) 4K/yr slash.tv (bidding war imminent??) 1K/yr slashdot.tv (/.tv not legal..) 1K/yr mastercard.tv (closing 4/11 (?)) 1K/yr pr0n.tv (a diamond in the rough!)
Um, gratifying to know linux is as popular as porn.
Idealab has something like 3 billion bucks to burn.. So the smartest thing they can do with it is try to sell beatles.tv and coke.tv to someone before they get sued? Fucking ridiculous, but maybe a good investment for them.. ouch.
Andover, put your money where you mouth is.. How about signing ms.tv over to the fsf?
Umm, shine a laser at a point on a film of this stuff and you get a magnetic domain? Potentially change characteristics by frequency? Gee you could even roll this stuff up and squish it into something resembling a cerebrum..
Can anybody say FPGA real real fast?
Sounds like this kind of material is going to get engineered into gates and wires much sooner than semiconductor tech will get there.
Might give a new twist to the moniker "Flash Memory"..
Military must be shitting they let the cat out of the bag.
Sorry I was referring to the idea that files which have not been used in a long time would be removed from the filesystem; a thrasher would increase the lifetime of a file at the expensive of others (a kind of dynamic ecology). Perhaps someone with experience in this area could help simulate/develop daemons to keep entropy in check. Caching seems at least on the surface to be only weakly related to this mechanism.
Currently freenet seems quite vulnerable to subversion by warez groups running bots together or just doing what they normally do.. overwhelming the filesystem and benefits of cache too if need be. Many sysadmins can easily exchange a lot of information about files in the system and coordinate with each other and their own bots. Instead of an arms race, why not just assign a percentage of diskspace to free-for-all likely used for warez and steganographic communication, and the remainder can be controlled in one way or another by librarian types.
Without acknowledging entropy the freenet will fail. Think of Africanized bees. If warez users discover that this is the UlTiMaTe playground it will suddenly be like turning the library into a DMZ with most of the users quickly implementing the latest munitions patches.
If there was plenty of diskspace (say the online diskspace used by the hundreds of copies of warez around now is reduced to one copy) there might be enough abundance to make this a smaller problem. But you are dealing with a megalomaniacal urge which has its own robotic and evolutionary side.
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Excellent solar page, thank you.
The sky is clear and darkening blue in Tokyo now, with a little red by the horizon which is sunset. I cannot see the aurora now, but it is a warm evening, and the darkened bulk usually hidden behind the crescent moon is visible with earthshine and perhaps some of the aurora too.
Cherry blossom time here, and the tree at the top of the hill where I live in Akabane is in full bloom today. Good luck to you.
If files live longer the more they are thrashed, will this not just breed thrasher bots and crowd out data from clients with less connectivity? How about a voting system for one or more directories which does not add files easily but they are there for good. If it is that good a resource it deserves a champion to protect it.
Also, I take it you are comfortable with already having divulged the identities of the entire first wave of sysadmins of FreeNet nodes? Seems like your most vulnerable time is now.
I've long considered the value of a peer to peer system for countries underdeveloped in the areas of infrastructure and rights. Unfortunately it seems that social engineering is steadily on the side of repression. Wouldn't the best way to get FreeNet into such environments be to make it a source of economic strength? In other words, your growth metric might look much better if you include authorship, copyright, and microcashpayment management. I can't see the Declaration of Independence sticking in the current system for long.. but it is in both a good library and a good bookstore.
Basically you have built a distribution system which in its optimal configuration has no delivery time since you already have the commodity on your hard drive.. make it work for business as well and it may reduce prices and take on a life of its own.
Chilling how your Nazi paradigm is not immediately thrown back in your faces by an angry mass of parents. This will likely be corrected when a lot of introverted Jewish kids in the New York/New Jersey area get turned in by their bullies who may happen to include antisemitic overtones.
Obviously you have it backwards, if anything turn in the bullies before they do physical harm. Make a homepage like that made for bad teachers by kids.. if you do this at all.
The only valid involvement of a security agency is to maintain immediate physical security (i.e. weapons checks, locker contents checks, video cameras in locker rooms (where I got jumped by two knife wielding classmates once myself..), etc...Or to provide a significant passive system which enhances overall security while having an essential neutral effect on other aspects of the environment.
I find it hard to believe that Pinkerton is seriously interested in improving the well-being of kids beyond crass, inhumane manipulation but don't let me stop you! You could always hire psychologists, pay for seminars, train teachers, offer help lines for kids, patrol school yards unobtrusively for violence/drugs, and so forth.
The kids who are having a horrible time already know it. Their teachers and parents probably do too and feel powerless (he has to learn to swim). If you are interested in playing a constructive role it may require reinventing your company; your first step will be to can the executives who engineered this soon to be fiasco.. NOW.
What you could do is provide a free anonymous web bulletin board which will let any child or teacher send worries, information about drug sale activities, requests that one or more lockers be unobtrusively searched by faculty or your service, or calls for help. You would reroute this automatically to a local school psychologist who might or might not act on it. Perhaps you could provide a Yahoo-like account that a child could log in to, to find out if someone is considering his or her message. Maybe a dialogue could be started that way.. but almost always it would be with a trained psychologist near the school trained to use the service by you. Since video games and libraries all have net connections these days this is an obvious win for you. You would organize messages relating to fears for personal security, or to possible criminal activity, into an "Urgent" category which would be sent to the head of the school (with your advertising for security devices/services, if you must, directed only to faculty) and your security agency would not touch with a ten foot pole any activity which could possibly be linked to a lawsuit (taken quite broadly, thank you). You will describe clearly what responsibilities the faculty has which you cannot handle, and monitoring the fulfillment of these responsibilities will be your security package toward parents.
I understand your firm's rapacious intent to capitalize on the perceived lack of physical security in U.S. schools and your easy implementation of the Nazi rule which turned children on parents. Your current plans look like quite a good preparation for more advanced methods of turning coworkers on each other, or perhaps building a juvenile potential danger index.. or whatever you call it, kids looking for a way out.. certainly this would be worth a lot of money to some people. It would seem that your firm's only choice now that the cat has been let out of the bag, is to hire some outside consultants to design you a believable project (probably 180 degrees away from your original intent) which will, yes, effectively contribute to the well being of kids who are in danger.. this not being jocks but their victims. Only success at this new, actually constructive, as opposed to dangerously obstructive, project will spin you out of this one.
The reason? It is just the crest of the Wave that you see in the fatalities. Looking only at the surface you see the bullies as victims. BUT most of the activity is below the surface.. where the victims of bullying and other prolonged psychological warfare have not gotten as empowered or isolated as the Columbine shooters, yet their invisble scars are deep enough to last a lifetime. In a way it's not your fault, you never had to worry about causes before. As the first group I've heard of anyway that has made any contribution at all to the debate about what to do about our schools, if you play your cards right you may get a ton of allies and it will be a cakewalk. You'll still make all that money you want to earn, and these other volunteers (oh forgot to say they are more important than you guys in solving the problem anyway) will be just that.. free. Now *there's* a dot com company!
Finally it may strike you as fanciful but consider that if a sufficient number of bright kids get victimized unfairly by your organization, with the amount of networking and firepower they could get if really motivated, I mean wrecked, by your system of institutionalized persecution, personally I think life insurance for Pinkerton execs as well as jocks would be a good bet. You could end up creating a real problem for yourselves.
Oh forgot to say, why not forget the schools and patrol the Boy Scouts of America instead. I mean, lead a local chapter for pay, or better yet a Scouts summer camp where things really get out of hand. Kids who join to find a way out like I did get to endure all kinds of dangerous shit like arson, aerosol can bombs, small explosives, infectious matter, institutionalized psychological warfare, and more!..and could use an adult around who has a vested (monetary) interest in their total well being. Hell, your men could become popular items! The idea that it's probably the same now but with more guns and less innocence around scares the hell out of me, how about you?
Make a big apology ("this dufus on our staff had it all backwards, we confiscated his pension"). Get an advanced website and toll call network up for these kids on your own dollar and maybe sign a constitution with the community at large which guarantees heavy penalties for implementation of a Nazi-toned Solution. Hire a silicon valley investment bank. Then we'll talk about trusting you with our kids.
I ported a giant Mac app to Windows using (ouchouchouch) Quicktime 4 as a porting layer. CodeWarrior was absolutely necessary (allowing us to compile Mac programs on Windows) and it rocked. Except the resource editor sucked (maybe it got better?) which made us use MS Studio for that side. There were bugs for sure, particularly things that made everything go BOOM when you clicked on a button I called the crash button.. in the IDE. Much has to do with how much memory you got (I really pushed it). Didn't test Java which also was available. Linux came out after that, didn't test it. You might have to purchase different platform IDEs separately now, but one of the most valuable parts of it was a very cool side by side window comparison utility, shades of Ediff. It seems possible that you might be able to compile Win on Lin and Lin on Win if the trend holds, maybe you should ask CW.
Just scanned tons of freenet/gnutella/eternity/cypherspace/* distributed file system pages I could find. The most advanced tech is not involved in the "information wants to be free" crap Negroponte spends his time on. Serious work involves encryption and ways to get around legal problems, ways to prevent malicious hacks, and ways to take this system full of media files and charge for them or mediate authorship/publishing rights. TANSTAAFL.
A significant accomplishment that poses a significant threat to RIAA would be not a way to get free music, but a new copyright/payment/distribution mechanism that both subverts the current system and provides a viable alternative. Otherwise you will just get more sneaky consumer hardware and lawsuits.
Something actually useful might be a server which can inject payment and copyright information into a gnutella/napster file space and handle encryption if necessary. Micropayments. Xanadu transcopyright. etc. etc. See what happens when a wireless walkman carries *that* with a little flashrom!
It would be insanely great (and poetic justice) to use Visa Cash for example to subvert exorbitant media pricing schemes.
Peer to peer networking is a little old. It won't grow beyond piracy or get secure quickly enough to stand up to say Christian Scientists travelling around the world suing people (or the RIAA).. unless the movers and shakers (musicians, advertisers, and tv/radio stations) get a vested interest in something else they can use. Hack a better distribution channel, not a/dev/null, and watch prices drop through the floor. Then you can take out your anger on M$' successors, RIAA, and other big baddies and promote the musicians you like listening to.
If it becomes an economic powerhouse this system will take over China too no worries.
The neatest peer networking scheme I've seen is Ricochet's portable ta/routers. They encrypted spread spectrum using frequency hopping schemes designed (by an actress and musician) for torpedoes, similar to synchronizing piano rolls.
Information may be prolific but rich corporations are prophylactic.
Very grateful to hear the summaries of the panel discussion. Unfortunately it sounds like it was an extremely disappointing event.. with speakers limiting the elaboration of their own greatest fears to bare vagaries.
Considering that Joy has already appealed to a large number of people, and that the speakers surely had access to each other before and after the event I would have hoped for a bit more. Obviously you'd have to be some kind of idiot to want to run selfbreeding nanotech out in the open.. but the kind of paralysis, both elective and not, promoted by the participants is horrifying.. more so the more creatively you consider it.
I submit that there is an inherent imbalance in the bandwidth applied to this discussion.. tons of it used in spreading Joy's article, and much less applied to the constructive end. Perhaps this panel discussion was destined to failure.. it sounds like it ended like many other panels I've herad in past years. At the very least we should have heard that the panel ended with recognition of the need for a larger scale workshop, or some kind of proposal for the direction of future inquiry.
It seems the logical conclusion is for Slashdot to invite Joy and/or others on the Panel to a moderated discussion over a few days (live and not live components) hosted at Slashdot or perhaps a more appropriate live mediated chat system. It might be a good way to feed the list (and I don't mean trolls!) and contribute to a solution.
Nobody is superhuman and I have a feeling that this sort of subject (nano/bio/ai) is the sort of thing where the more you know the worse it gets.
At the very least Slashdot could take a wild, unconventional leap, and try to make a thread that lasted more than a day.. Offer to Joy, the other panelists, and as many relevant experienced individuals as can be found to visit a certain/. coordinate, absorb, and post comments, once daily for a week even! Maybe solicit brief texts in advance so there is more oomph behind it even!
Spend some of your money on paying some great moderators, and though these kinds of people probably don't need money to participate perhaps maintaining a dedicated server program and editorial staff for a long term project to support thought on the subject. That is if you think it is worth more than a few posts to the Slashdot community. Perhaps it could be a mailing list with moderation services donated by Slashdot's editorial team, just enough to keep out trolls and summarize bunches of newbie and offtopic questions at once.
I have experience doing a very successful long term (4 year) project (www.northkorea.org) with a small number of staff (me and a newsweek bureau chief), one based on strong editorial involvement, and believe if you can provide that kind of capability you could turn Slashdot into an even more powerful mind magnifier.. and help solve burning problems by turning this lens onto a single point and holding it there. Go for it! Willing to discuss my experience more if it will help you.
From someone who's hacked his way through the jungle of QT4 for Windows, it just seems like Apple is trying to figure out how far to go and when.
Apple didn't give QT to Windows users for free, they got Bill to pay them for it plus guarantee Office for the Mac. But the other side of the coin is that Quicktime for Windows includes a huge part of the MacOS. You can execute a ton of toolbox calls inside Windows programs, up to where Windows' inferiority just makes it ridiculous to push farther (which is how far we got). Thousands and thousands of pages of Apple's CD based encyclopedic documentation was required reading. Needless to say it is an extremely broad media layer, basically all the semantic structure you need to describe most any kind of media.
If Apple wants to bring a broader Unix development community in they at least have to provide player binaries. But this wouldn't make much sense since it would just be slaking the end-user's thirst without providing any meat.. Yet providing QT libraries for Linux would probably enable anything based on QT to be developed without Apple hardware.
My guess is they definitely wouldn't want to do anything before making a big splash with their own BSD system, after which they will do their best to attract serious developers to their platform and focus first on building more tools to ensure their platform remains the ideal one for development and serving. Apple will never open source all of Quicktime. But there might be a percentage in it for them if Apple does release binaries of the libraries at the same time as the Unix player app.. that is, you have to have *all* the libraries to run the movie player. It might drag a bunch of momentum away from people involved in other graphic and music oriented Linux projects for one thing, build tons of good will, and possibly make Apple hardware and code an important basis for future Linux development.
That said do people think Apple finds RedHat an enemy or would they be willing to build a RedHat-only binary QT distro ofr say $150M like they did for Gates?
Oh yeah forgot to say, there's a bit more to video compression than delta encoding.. anyway last two cents Apple would profit by getting more developers into QT than non-QT projects if Linux libraries were released asap.
Slashdot Mirror
I submitted a story to Slashdot yesterday (declined) about Sony's announcement of peripherals tacked on to the end of Memory Sticks like thin Pez heads. On TV in Tokyo they showed last night a teeny little GPS antenna the size of your pinky fingernail, clock, ccd camera, and microphone, all in the same form factor. Apparently this Memory Stick Duo series is going to provide a common serial interface across widely different consumer items, from an Aibo to a camera, to headphones, to your wristwatch, they said. Maybe a firewire or infrared connection will make networking easier..
Wonderful effort, you got as much as you could expect from them at this point. Further gains on this front will only come when a connection between market growth and the value system you expounded can be demonstrated to Pinkerton.
This is EXACTLY what Neil Stephenson meant when he suggested injustices done by corporations were more important targets than Big Brother's own spying.
I believe Slashdot power can be harnessed by first building a simple site with a database of email, phone, fax, and mailing address of every school board representative and member of state or government legislature. Visitors would input their state, compose a letter in an online form, and have the site send it to the appropriate people. *Maybe* Andover could pay for bulk snail mail of letters to offline representatives. This is the easy part. Physical mail is more effective, so offer the database to people who want to write snail mail themselves.
The magnification comes from requiring journalists who ask about the campaign to print the full URL of the site (and fax number or mailing address if Andover is willing) in their own articles, broadcasts, or interviews with you. Viewers of these articles who don't read Slashdot will see an available outlet for the indignant impulse, and you will also build a library of anti-Pinkerton email. CNN, AOL and other services also might be asked to carry a link in related articles. Also require writers who cover the site to send copies of their articles to you and post them on the site as well.
If you can also personally answer all email sent to you through the site, you should be able to develop an even more powerful feedback loop and gain real allies. I did a project like this before. It took a few years and it will certainly take a lot of your time, probably for no pay.. but it will work to the degree that you put energy into it. You might also be able to serially publish in online and offline venues constructive criticism amassed from non-tech types through the site, this would provide magnification of brainpower, not just a simple multiplication of email.
Personally I was bullied too, and had to change school districts twice: once out of private school in the first grade, after my parents won a court case against the school, next back to private school after eighth grade (due to physical danger and shittiness of the public school). I had an incredibly supportive family and enough money to commute 45 minutes each way to an expensive private high school, and was very lucky.. it changed my life. But this experience tells me there would have to be a tidal wave of lawsuits like the very difficult one my own family won, to stop Pinkerton after untold damage was done. Much better for everyone if it could be fought out in the media ahead of time.
Here's my experience rushing from Gimp relaive newbie to Perl-Fu acolyte (not quite black belt that's for sure) on a deadline, in under two weeks. This tells me if someone is willing to keep an eye on a critical Gimp installation it's probably worth it..
/. effect better than your own multitasked server.
After a lot of struggle with Gimp (an old beta which undoubtedly was half the stability problem) I was able to build a Perl based compositing system and generate a thousand html pages and as many gifs and jpegs (with alpha masked, highlited thumbnails), using Perl-Fu to do repetitive operations and other Perl programs to rip representative layouts into templates and also to generate the pages with the right hypertext references (a db wasn't allowed). The data was a couple of CDs worth of Photoshop files (which I had to hand rip from layers into jpegs since many designers had worked on it) for 12 hotels.
It was all done from scratch in less than two weeks, and though I might have saved time using deBabelizer (I realized after I was hip deep in it) I ended up with some cool semiautomatic tools. The justification was that despite a very short deadline, changes were coming in from the client constantly. The volume was just enough (and my carpal tunnel looking scary enough) that I wanted to make it work badly. In particular new photos could be dropped into the source directory and a new site could build itself in about two minutes for page generation and two minutes for resizing and thumbnail generation. on a 450MHz PIII (Dell Inspiron laptop). Watching all the little windows open up and save themselves was honestly, a blast!
Some problems that I experienced were inability to open some seemingly good Photoshop files, 4-layer jpegs couldn't load, some functions I thought ought to work didn't, and other little bugs and crashes (the crashes were soft and quick). The biggest annoyance was Gimp's refusal to open dialog boxes on top of the main workspace, but this was not a Perl-Fu problem. Lots of time was taken with giving up on Scheme, figuring out how Perl-Fu worked, and adding fixes, like different numbers of thumbnails for different sections, preparing layout template code, deciphering strange source files from the designers, and automatically dealing with vertically oriented images.
This is great for when you have a ton of processing work, but if you want to run it from CGI or cron and don't have the author watching over the system I'd recommend very tightly limiting the kinds of operations you do with it, and watch the output. It might be very good for adding new images to a database-backed site.
If you want to experiment for a similar use as I did I recommend not trying to use scheme since you don't know what's going on, and start with running little programlets in perl, e.g. I modified the pgshell program so I could past a whole block from my processing programs into a buffer that would run it so I could test procedures.
On the other hand maybe this site is good advertising for Gimp stability.. at the very least with 40 processes they might handle the
I'm guessing rotation could be measured with a radio, maybe some doppler thing (heck Arecibo is listening at 1 Ghz).
c .htm>scimedia's encyclopedia</a>)
Terahertz is molecular rotation range, but also microwave frequency.. If you hang an organometallic functional group off the side, or just do anything electrical at that rate, wouldn't this become a little microwave broadcasting station? Not sure I want to use a computer with a microwave bus without my lead-lined undershorts and sweatband. Or might spinning structure in a magnetic field act like an antenna and charge up the substrate with static charge..
(spectrum cf. <a href=http://www.scimedia.com/chem-ed/light/em-spe
I find things like ftp or java sessions running inside an MS-DOS window in Window$ 98 run a *lot* faster if you twirl the mouse cursor around real fast in circles over the Dos Window..
I know a guy who has been working on nanotech for real products. Apparently the first realistic uses of the stuff is as thin films.. the soonest apparently may be a carbon tubule based lubricant for hard drives, which lets the head skate over the medium. Problems include toxicity of the stuff plus difficulty in quality control but it ain't impossible. Covered in the article? dunno, slashdotted.
That's not really a lot of memory since it still uses terms we can pronounce to describe it.
Figure instead that this is a crystal ball and find out what year it is to be available with serious transfer rates.
At that time,
- All AOL's forums are digital video only viewable from Netscape 16 (forked away from Mozilla)
- RIAA distributes DVD quality music videos of the top 100 singles weekly in throwaway chips like those AOL CD's people get in the mail these days ("a great loss leader") with 2048 bit SDMI encoded in the hardware controller.
- Sony's Playstation V, having broken another sales record, is issued a recall since someone found a secret password for the test screen which renders SDMI useless! Oh Shit!
- Tons of encrypted software comes with tons more of free interactive ads and spam is a fond memory.
- Transmeta slates, which allow you to plug these memory chips into thin little bays inset all around the edges, will directly connect to fiber in public spaces (spread spectrum that can handle the bandwidth will fry your zygotes in a flash)
- Micro$oft still sux but who gives a shit. Bill sez "the consumer is happier now than every before" etc.
- You set the deSDMI chip emulator in your slate to the public key signature of the viral FiL3Z band which infects the omnipresent fiber net, dial up your favorite virtual file system (not FreeNet since they all got arrested in early 2001) and download today's news plus the latest RIAA password. Andover has been bought out by CNet and the original Slashdot crew (fired though some were coopted by the new owners) run (virtually) for the data havens where they can broadcast Geeks in Space in peace.
- As an afterthought you turn over extra computing power to the daily RIAA decryption effort. Having seen it was finished hours ago (someone in the quantum chip labs in Switzerland have been playing around over coffee break) you turn it to the distributed Seti project, having the last year of raw observatory data in an auxiliary bay. There are a couple inexplicable Wow events on the charts but more processing is needed..
- Hackers and mainstream couch potatoes incredibly unite against AOL and steal the keys to the data stream. Artists get rich from direct payments from advertisers, and with TimeWarner going down the tubes AOL is looking for an exit strategy.
- Programmers are working feverishly within the GPL liscense to support the latest quantum computing hardware (for the first time Linux may support this hardware before any OS). The only problem is when the chip delves into other universes during a computation the subjectivity breaks; it keeps finding references to OS's by Linus' parallel twin sister Eunice (who makes her own wild Mozilla skins) and strangely enough.. hot grits?
- World domination at last. Who won? Doh.
I seem to remember micrograph photos of the garnet based bubble memory showing units shaped like the letter "L", which sequestered small magnetic domains that could be moved. Donuts were the old iron ferrite core memories. Which you access by wires.
The new stuff sounds like charge is neither moved nor accessed by wires, though the donut shape seems to be very good at holding a magnetic charge, or maybe they just shoot the charge through donut holes to reach the bottom one.. a little vague in the story.
The guys who made a drive out of a roll of scotch tape figure they can write to all the layers of scotch tape at once, for a holographic memory or multichannel movie.
Just remember wherever you go,.. there you are.
By the way studio types would constantly freak when checking out the system, and the biggest problem really was explaining to them all the things that you could do with this kind of nonlinear nonrestricted system. A conceptual barrier more than any. Maybe not a problem in your market.
I've seen a Mac based system used for broadcast quality work. Premiere and After Effects were the main software, but you can use anything to draw frames. A separate tower built with a bunch of fast hard disks striping for speed handled live recording and playback. A beta deck is needed for commercial work but quality wise DV is very close.
Basically you show people your work, they say let's change this, you do it while they stare over your shoulder, then you hit render, and let the guys fall asleep on the couch. Video can be fully on disk or part on tape. Extremely cost effective even on an 8400 Mac, though G4 is what you would want now 30 gigs will disappear in a flash, get yourself dat backup. Get a mixing board for music input or maybe you could do it on the Mac.
There were some problems with Premiere that could crash the system if you touch files that Premiere is working with, but this kind of interactivity and customizability is a new thing.. the only problem being that studio types and operators also are used to Avid.
Biggest bitches seem to be the need to replace hard drives when they die (apparently 3-4 months sometimes), and also dealing with video card manufacturer.. a very expensive video card is important. These two points mean that you need to have some knowledge of hardware.
Thank you very much for giving time to my questions, though sorry to say I am very disappointed with your response.
Since you did not answer them directly I would like to clarify. Personally I am excited by the possibilities of Freenet, and maybe it is all a race against time after all. But your responses seemed too easy.. and oblique. In other words, you are not a superstar.. yet.
By thrasher bots I meant to suggest a distributed attack by bots living on servers around the world, close to major network centers, or perhaps virtual hosted/hacked into otherwise high traffic Freenet servers. Obviously I read your FAQ before posting.. doh. Can we be a little more patronizing please?
The question was, how about dividing Freenet resources between volatile 100% FR33 files and nonvolatile files which are not subject to the popularity requirement (their disk space might be managed by a group of civil liberty proponents, or publicly). The closest post to this question is the one about pro-life advocates committing murder through the Freenet.
About divulging the names of the first wave of sysadmins, this had to do with the People and Mailing Lists sections on your site, not with inform.php. Email addresses are visible in many documents. You act as if you are operating in a safe environment. I realized you may want to stay in the open, and without talent this project would die. Maybe cyperpunks could use remailers.. but current developers' full names and email addresses are listed there and the FBI or NSA probably knows their street addresses by now. Mr Freeh (if he still is in office) could wait a little while until some user (or agent perhaps) posted a bunch of copyrighted software on Freenet and then start threatening people. Developers would already know about the possibility of misuse and might be held responsible or threatened, based on the personal identity information skimmed from your site. I'm suggesting that in time you could wish you had spent more time on security in the beginning. If you do have some security you should tell people about it, for now it seems to be glossed over. Open Source is not the place to try being safe through obscurity.
As for selling on the Freenet I don't think this necessitates "missing the point [you] are making". If a repressive government discovered Freenet they could make a death penalty for hosting a server (just call the sysadmin a hacker and have him be Chinese). This would not happen if the "New Economy" became in part dependent on Freenet. Bootleg software is not welcomed by software companies so this is not a good product. For example, the only obvious reasons why China is listening to the U.S. about rights at all are economic (WTO, Taiwan, U.S. barriers, etc.). Economics (and also building up the ego) is a point of leverage with these regimes. And who knows? You could say Freenet is the Communist dream, and get funding from the Chinese government! You seem to think this will automatically seep everywhere it is needed and that you will not be fighting a battle and this will be a problem.
Take a look at NTT (Japan's historical telephone monopoly). They tried to kill the Internet for decades in Japan (I know, I started one of the first few providers in 1994 riding on AT&T's liscense). Now they have been broken up and as of May 2000, they are being forced to cut prices in half with the champion of that being Sony's President Idei. Meanwhile Sony has announced they are starting an online bank. This is possible because of the billions made by Softbank off Yahoo recently in the middle of an otherwise dismal Japanese economy.. NTT has been holding back not only the Internet but also the economy.
About your coming trials.. I built www.northkorea.org for a Newsweek bureau chief (Bernie Krisher), a volunteer site dedicated to buying food and medicine with money donated through the Internet. We attracted a quarter million dollars, mainly due I think to this man's heroism (he suffered a stroke and heart trouble, once hospitalized in North Korea actually) and the many newspaper and TV runs we were able to engineer. While in the end the project got positive recognition by the U.S. government, the U.S. bank account was frozen and several times Bernie's political expertise was needed to navigate the waters. At one point he consulted a top legal mind at the U.N. he knew about potential liability but his "Damn the torpedos" stubborness succeeded. Mind you, Bernie is a world famous journalist in his 70s, had a humanitarian project, and had information from colleagues and the World Food Program that things were much worse than the North Koreans were letting on.
If Freenet became a conduit for sensitive technologies to Iraq for example, freezing your bank account will be the least of your worries.
You may want to bring some of the freedom felt on the old Internet, but you cannot roll back the clock. The world has changed and you ignore this at your peril. Or are you ignoring Hotline in an attempt to be able to claim innocence later on? Heck do you even have a lawyer on this? Is it legal to work on this project in America? Considering the mishmash of changing laws you could easily be leading a lot of people into trouble. I would be surprised if you do not get a lawsuit from someone soon.
These dangers could be alleviated by attention to working within current notions of copyright, be it transcopyright or some other animal. We don't live in a post-copyright world, sorry that is your own meaningless wordplay and it makes you look dumb while being irrelevant to your stated goals. Propose a better way for people to ensure attribution and recompensation for labor in the digital world yourself if you feel up to it.
Perhaps Freenet could become a substrate for other ecommerce efforts, maybe Xanadu+microcash or something else. Maybe if you just want to do programming you can try to leave the coming fight to someone else. But free information is both anathema to all governments as well as an ideal for which some strive. Considering growth and security strategies (for Freenet and for the developer team) based on how the world works today might be important enough to think about sooner than later. I'm not saying you can handle it alone. Why not talk to the EFF and get some more brainpower and experience on these problems.
IMNSHO if you are honest about preserving freedom in repressed societies you should become a virus writer, climb into a hole somewhere, and build your own freenet with heavy encryption and bandwidth limits (easier to stash and warez-unfriendly), and without all this bullshit. It'll take you a lot farther and keep you safe, ignorant, and dangerous (in an infectious sense), which is what you want, right?
P.S. I think Islands in the Net is a great book too. Read it. It talks not about a null future but one in which enlightened individuals rise to positions in enlightened organizations where they can leverage resources against the bad guys and that includes money. More realistic than your own novel.. though the fragility of personal security jibes well.
5K/yr warez.tv
Auction Ends: 5 days after you submit this bid
Bid starts at..
1M/yr cnet.tv (owns tv.com)
1M/yr msn.tv
1M/yr sex.tv
500K/yr mtv.tv
50K/yr porn.tv
50K/yr linux.tv
27K/yr i.tv
25K/yr m.tv
25K/yr ms.tv (should someone buy this??)
20K/yr wrestling.tv
11K/yr n.tv
10K/yr zd.tv (a good deal??)
4K/yr opensource.tv (silly.. doh)
4K/yr slash.tv (bidding war imminent??)
1K/yr slashdot.tv (/.tv not legal..)
1K/yr mastercard.tv (closing 4/11 (?))
1K/yr pr0n.tv (a diamond in the rough!)
Um, gratifying to know linux is as popular as porn.
Idealab has something like 3 billion bucks to burn.. So the smartest thing they can do with it is try to sell beatles.tv and coke.tv to someone before they get sued? Fucking ridiculous, but maybe a good investment for them.. ouch.
Andover, put your money where you mouth is.. How about signing ms.tv over to the fsf?
Slashdotted already! Keerist!
Umm, shine a laser at a point on a film of this stuff and you get a magnetic domain? Potentially change characteristics by frequency? Gee you could even roll this stuff up and squish it into something resembling a cerebrum..
Can anybody say FPGA real real fast?
Sounds like this kind of material is going to get engineered into gates and wires much sooner than semiconductor tech will get there.
Might give a new twist to the moniker "Flash Memory"..
Military must be shitting they let the cat out of the bag.
Sorry I was referring to the idea that files which have not been used in a long time would be removed from the filesystem; a thrasher would increase the lifetime of a file at the expensive of others (a kind of dynamic ecology). Perhaps someone with experience in this area could help simulate/develop daemons to keep entropy in check. Caching seems at least on the surface to be only weakly related to this mechanism.
Currently freenet seems quite vulnerable to subversion by warez groups running bots together or just doing what they normally do.. overwhelming the filesystem and benefits of cache too if need be. Many sysadmins can easily exchange a lot of information about files in the system and coordinate with each other and their own bots. Instead of an arms race, why not just assign a percentage of diskspace to free-for-all likely used for warez and steganographic communication, and the remainder can be controlled in one way or another by librarian types.
Without acknowledging entropy the freenet will fail. Think of Africanized bees. If warez users discover that this is the UlTiMaTe playground it will suddenly be like turning the library into a DMZ with most of the users quickly implementing the latest munitions patches.
If there was plenty of diskspace (say the online diskspace used by the hundreds of copies of warez around now is reduced to one copy) there might be enough abundance to make this a smaller problem. But you are dealing with a megalomaniacal urge which has its own robotic and evolutionary side.
Excellent solar page, thank you.
The sky is clear and darkening blue in Tokyo now, with a little red by the horizon which is sunset. I cannot see the aurora now, but it is a warm evening, and the darkened bulk usually hidden behind the crescent moon is visible with earthshine and perhaps some of the aurora too.
Cherry blossom time here, and the tree at the top of the hill where I live in Akabane is in full bloom today. Good luck to you.
If files live longer the more they are thrashed, will this not just breed thrasher bots and crowd out data from clients with less connectivity? How about a voting system for one or more directories which does not add files easily but they are there for good. If it is that good a resource it deserves a champion to protect it.
Also, I take it you are comfortable with already having divulged the identities of the entire first wave of sysadmins of FreeNet nodes? Seems like your most vulnerable time is now.
I've long considered the value of a peer to peer system for countries underdeveloped in the areas of infrastructure and rights. Unfortunately it seems that social engineering is steadily on the side of repression. Wouldn't the best way to get FreeNet into such environments be to make it a source of economic strength? In other words, your growth metric might look much better if you include authorship, copyright, and microcashpayment management. I can't see the Declaration of Independence sticking in the current system for long.. but it is in both a good library and a good bookstore.
Basically you have built a distribution system which in its optimal configuration has no delivery time since you already have the commodity on your hard drive.. make it work for business as well and it may reduce prices and take on a life of its own.
Chilling how your Nazi paradigm is not immediately thrown back in your faces by an angry mass of parents. This will likely be corrected when a lot of introverted Jewish kids in the New York/New Jersey area get turned in by their bullies who may happen to include antisemitic overtones.
..Or to provide a significant passive system which enhances overall security while having an essential neutral effect on other aspects of the environment.
..and could use an adult around who has a vested (monetary) interest in their total well being. Hell, your men could become popular items! The idea that it's probably the same now but with more guns and less innocence around scares the hell out of me, how about you?
Obviously you have it backwards, if anything turn in the bullies before they do physical harm. Make a homepage like that made for bad teachers by kids.. if you do this at all.
The only valid involvement of a security agency is to maintain immediate physical security (i.e. weapons checks, locker contents checks, video cameras in locker rooms (where I got jumped by two knife wielding classmates once myself..), etc.
I find it hard to believe that Pinkerton is seriously interested in improving the well-being of kids beyond crass, inhumane manipulation but don't let me stop you! You could always hire psychologists, pay for seminars, train teachers, offer help lines for kids, patrol school yards unobtrusively for violence/drugs, and so forth.
The kids who are having a horrible time already know it. Their teachers and parents probably do too and feel powerless (he has to learn to swim). If you are interested in playing a constructive role it may require reinventing your company; your first step will be to can the executives who engineered this soon to be fiasco.. NOW.
What you could do is provide a free anonymous web bulletin board which will let any child or teacher send worries, information about drug sale activities, requests that one or more lockers be unobtrusively searched by faculty or your service, or calls for help. You would reroute this automatically to a local school psychologist who might or might not act on it. Perhaps you could provide a Yahoo-like account that a child could log in to, to find out if someone is considering his or her message. Maybe a dialogue could be started that way.. but almost always it would be with a trained psychologist near the school trained to use the service by you. Since video games and libraries all have net connections these days this is an obvious win for you. You would organize messages relating to fears for personal security, or to possible criminal activity, into an "Urgent" category which would be sent to the head of the school (with your advertising for security devices/services, if you must, directed only to faculty) and your security agency would not touch with a ten foot pole any activity which could possibly be linked to a lawsuit (taken quite broadly, thank you). You will describe clearly what responsibilities the faculty has which you cannot handle, and monitoring the fulfillment of these responsibilities will be your security package toward parents.
I understand your firm's rapacious intent to capitalize on the perceived lack of physical security in U.S. schools and your easy implementation of the Nazi rule which turned children on parents. Your current plans look like quite a good preparation for more advanced methods of turning coworkers on each other, or perhaps building a juvenile potential danger index.. or whatever you call it, kids looking for a way out.. certainly this would be worth a lot of money to some people.
It would seem that your firm's only choice now that the cat has been let out of the bag, is to hire some outside consultants to design you a believable project (probably 180 degrees away from your original intent) which will, yes, effectively contribute to the well being of kids who are in danger.. this not being jocks but their victims. Only success at this new, actually constructive, as opposed to dangerously obstructive, project will spin you out of this one.
The reason? It is just the crest of the Wave that you see in the fatalities. Looking only at the surface you see the bullies as victims. BUT most of the activity is below the surface.. where the victims of bullying and other prolonged psychological warfare have not gotten as empowered or isolated as the Columbine shooters, yet their invisble scars are deep enough to last a lifetime. In a way it's not your fault, you never had to worry about causes before.
As the first group I've heard of anyway that has made any contribution at all to the debate about what to do about our schools, if you play your cards right you may get a ton of allies and it will be a cakewalk. You'll still make all that money you want to earn, and these other volunteers (oh forgot to say they are more important than you guys in solving the problem anyway) will be just that.. free. Now *there's* a dot com company!
Finally it may strike you as fanciful but consider that if a sufficient number of bright kids get victimized unfairly by your organization, with the amount of networking and firepower they could get if really motivated, I mean wrecked, by your system of institutionalized persecution, personally I think life insurance for Pinkerton execs as well as jocks would be a good bet. You could end up creating a real problem for yourselves.
Oh forgot to say, why not forget the schools and patrol the Boy Scouts of America instead. I mean, lead a local chapter for pay, or better yet a Scouts summer camp where things really get out of hand. Kids who join to find a way out like I did get to endure all kinds of dangerous shit like arson, aerosol can bombs, small explosives, infectious matter, institutionalized psychological warfare, and more!
Make a big apology ("this dufus on our staff had it all backwards, we confiscated his pension"). Get an advanced website and toll call network up for these kids on your own dollar and maybe sign a constitution with the community at large which guarantees heavy penalties for implementation of a Nazi-toned Solution. Hire a silicon valley investment bank. Then we'll talk about trusting you with our kids.
I ported a giant Mac app to Windows using (ouchouchouch) Quicktime 4 as a porting layer. CodeWarrior was absolutely necessary (allowing us to compile Mac programs on Windows) and it rocked. Except the resource editor sucked (maybe it got better?) which made us use MS Studio for that side. There were bugs for sure, particularly things that made everything go BOOM when you clicked on a button I called the crash button.. in the IDE. Much has to do with how much memory you got (I really pushed it). Didn't test Java which also was available. Linux came out after that, didn't test it. You might have to purchase different platform IDEs separately now, but one of the most valuable parts of it was a very cool side by side window comparison utility, shades of Ediff. It seems possible that you might be able to compile Win on Lin and Lin on Win if the trend holds, maybe you should ask CW.
Just scanned tons of freenet/gnutella/eternity/cypherspace/* distributed file system pages I could find. The most advanced tech is not involved in the "information wants to be free" crap Negroponte spends his time on. Serious work involves encryption and ways to get around legal problems, ways to prevent malicious hacks, and ways to take this system full of media files and charge for them or mediate authorship/publishing rights. TANSTAAFL.
/dev/null, and watch prices drop through the floor. Then you can take out your anger on M$' successors, RIAA, and other big baddies and promote the musicians you like listening to.
A significant accomplishment that poses a significant threat to RIAA would be not a way to get free music, but a new copyright/payment/distribution mechanism that both subverts the current system and provides a viable alternative. Otherwise you will just get more sneaky consumer hardware and lawsuits.
Something actually useful might be a server which can inject payment and copyright information into a gnutella/napster file space and handle encryption if necessary. Micropayments. Xanadu transcopyright. etc. etc. See what happens when a wireless walkman carries *that* with a little flashrom!
It would be insanely great (and poetic justice) to use Visa Cash for example to subvert exorbitant media pricing schemes.
Peer to peer networking is a little old. It won't grow beyond piracy or get secure quickly enough to stand up to say Christian Scientists travelling around the world suing people (or the RIAA).. unless the movers and shakers (musicians, advertisers, and tv/radio stations) get a vested interest in something else they can use. Hack a better distribution channel, not a
If it becomes an economic powerhouse this system will take over China too no worries.
The neatest peer networking scheme I've seen is Ricochet's portable ta/routers. They encrypted spread spectrum using frequency hopping schemes designed (by an actress and musician) for torpedoes, similar to synchronizing piano rolls.
Information may be prolific but rich corporations are prophylactic.
Oh P.S. the higher end HP is Pentium III.. and I am not sure what's in the Visualization Center but likely Pentium III.
Very grateful to hear the summaries of the panel discussion. Unfortunately it sounds like it was an extremely disappointing event.. with speakers limiting the elaboration of their own greatest fears to bare vagaries.
/. coordinate, absorb, and post comments, once daily for a week even! Maybe solicit brief texts in advance so there is more oomph behind it even!
Considering that Joy has already appealed to a large number of people, and that the speakers surely had access to each other before and after the event I would have hoped for a bit more. Obviously you'd have to be some kind of idiot to want to run selfbreeding nanotech out in the open.. but the kind of paralysis, both elective and not, promoted by the participants is horrifying.. more so the more creatively you consider it.
I submit that there is an inherent imbalance in the bandwidth applied to this discussion.. tons of it used in spreading Joy's article, and much less applied to the constructive end. Perhaps this panel discussion was destined to failure.. it sounds like it ended like many other panels I've herad in past years. At the very least we should have heard that the panel ended with recognition of the need for a larger scale workshop, or some kind of proposal for the direction of future inquiry.
It seems the logical conclusion is for Slashdot to invite Joy and/or others on the Panel to a moderated discussion over a few days (live and not live components) hosted at Slashdot or perhaps a more appropriate live mediated chat system. It might be a good way to feed the list (and I don't mean trolls!) and contribute to a solution.
Nobody is superhuman and I have a feeling that this sort of subject (nano/bio/ai) is the sort of thing where the more you know the worse it gets.
At the very least Slashdot could take a wild, unconventional leap, and try to make a thread that lasted more than a day.. Offer to Joy, the other panelists, and as many relevant experienced individuals as can be found to visit a certain
Spend some of your money on paying some great moderators, and though these kinds of people probably don't need money to participate perhaps maintaining a dedicated server program and editorial staff for a long term project to support thought on the subject. That is if you think it is worth more than a few posts to the Slashdot community. Perhaps it could be a mailing list with moderation services donated by Slashdot's editorial team, just enough to keep out trolls and summarize bunches of newbie and offtopic questions at once.
I have experience doing a very successful long term (4 year) project (www.northkorea.org) with a small number of staff (me and a newsweek bureau chief), one based on strong editorial involvement, and believe if you can provide that kind of capability you could turn Slashdot into an even more powerful mind magnifier.. and help solve burning problems by turning this lens onto a single point and holding it there. Go for it! Willing to discuss my experience more if it will help you.
From someone who's hacked his way through the jungle of QT4 for Windows, it just seems like Apple is trying to figure out how far to go and when.
Apple didn't give QT to Windows users for free, they got Bill to pay them for it plus guarantee Office for the Mac. But the other side of the coin is that Quicktime for Windows includes a huge part of the MacOS. You can execute a ton of toolbox calls inside Windows programs, up to where Windows' inferiority just makes it ridiculous to push farther (which is how far we got). Thousands and thousands of pages of Apple's CD based encyclopedic documentation was required reading. Needless to say it is an extremely broad media layer, basically all the semantic structure you need to describe most any kind of media.
If Apple wants to bring a broader Unix development community in they at least have to provide player binaries. But this wouldn't make much sense since it would just be slaking the end-user's thirst without providing any meat.. Yet providing QT libraries for Linux would probably enable anything based on QT to be developed without Apple hardware.
My guess is they definitely wouldn't want to do anything before making a big splash with their own BSD system, after which they will do their best to attract serious developers to their platform and focus first on building more tools to ensure their platform remains the ideal one for development and serving. Apple will never open source all of Quicktime. But there might be a percentage in it for them if Apple does release binaries of the libraries at the same time as the Unix player app.. that is, you have to have *all* the libraries to run the movie player. It might drag a bunch of momentum away from people involved in other graphic and music oriented Linux projects for one thing, build tons of good will, and possibly make Apple hardware and code an important basis for future Linux development.
That said do people think Apple finds RedHat an enemy or would they be willing to build a RedHat-only binary QT distro ofr say $150M like they did for Gates?
Oh yeah forgot to say, there's a bit more to video compression than delta encoding.. anyway last two cents Apple would profit by getting more developers into QT than non-QT projects if Linux libraries were released asap.