... asking for wrong solution. Bots send spam to your comments log. How is it different from sending spam mail to your email address, once they learn about it? They earn money if they are successful, you gain nothing if they aren't. Therefore they can invest some of it in overcoming the barriers you put in their way.
You can never win, but I suggest making it harder for them (hurting their profit): Unlike with email spam, they lose some money on human "burglars" and the process slows them a bit.
1) generate new ones at as high rate as possible - don't let them reuse one solution. 2) put multiple captchas ( a time-varying number, say... 1-3, so that hired solvers couldn't establish a rhytm - it'll get them tired sooner). 3) slow down both passing thru them and the posting process. 4) occasionally ask submitters to solve yet another captcha after the post was submitted. 5) And, most important, run adaptive (Bayesian) antispam filter on each submitted post and reject those who fail:D (Bwahahahahuhuhahahaha, after going thru all that, they gave money for nothing, lol, rofl)
Oh, I actually suggest that they should be honest, or fair, to be exact.
State their needs and let everyone compete (if the terms suit them).
Who can tell, perhaps Microsoft would donate their software to India's schools for free and open a lot of technology development centers in India so that they Indian programmers can influence the process of making it suitable for their own needs and with affordable price, too?
Outright closing the door in some potential contestants' faces is rude and irritating. Besides, the point to make is more...to the point, if it is made on failing to meet certain important terms of a contest i.e. openness, freedom. Other way, the point is only that point on top of the middle finger, which can be interpreted quite wrongly.
On a sidenote, I actually expect Microsoft to become great and successful provider of free software (you can laugh... for now), because the overall pressure is rising, the landscape is changing and they will certainly not just die without trying to adapt themselves. I mean, the businesses and governments which actually do buy their products would be happy to buy service from them too, even if they had the source code on their disposal, while significant majority of user base in the world use pirated copies anyway. They already have more to gain then to lose if they switch on the Freedom side (i.e. disarming and eradicating the competition... we should not trust them... ever!).
Remotely related to that (in case that other point is the one), you can be underhanded in your ends (in your mind) and yet completely honest in your conduct, break no rules, favorize none a priori, be up to your statements (just be sofisticated in making right statements). The world is full of such examples in politics and business. "Wheaseling" is the category term, is it not?
In this case, it is "small wheaseling" or "defense of the weak": frontal rejection of offer from a big, wealthy, powerful global company residing in, and financing thru taxes, world's strongest military superforce (and armory of your archenemy neighbour) on the grounds of: "we don't like you for what you are" is a slap in the face to that company and looking for trouble (more trouble, that is). Rumor has it that this company is underhanded itself. Faced with a "brick wall" political decision of an governmental body of a foreign country (which, rumor has it, has fine income from insourcing from company's domicile country), the company will certainly pull own strings at home, political and media connections to unleash some pressure on that foreign country and in this case there certainly is plenty of opportunities for that.
...MAKE them come to their own conclusion? I mean, if you assign no money to buy software but FORBID under DRACONIAN measures use of pirated software and MANDATE that they must equip a number of computers, what else really they CAN do but download and install free software? Then they could boast around about their lawfull antipiracy policy instead of beeing accused of beeing anti-business.
Re:The next mod should be...
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Output Mouse
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...glove mouse? OK, I know it's an old idea, but now you can use it as... a mouse... (duh), with a display on the back of your hand.
synthetics have a mix of 8 (which is normal) and 4 (which is not) sided internal structures
Actually diamond is a pure carbon crystal with 4-sided (tetrahedral, 4 equilateral triangles) structure grid, unlike other naturally occuring elementary pure carbon mineral, graphite, which has hexagonal prismatic grid (8 sides: 6 rectangles connecting two hexagons).
Therefore, it is assumed that you made a slight permutation in your comments: for a diamond, 4 sided grid cell is normal, 8 sided grid cell is not normal, but it would be normal for graphite, cheap mineral which is likely a base material for synthetic diamond. However, it is perhaps too much to expect that all the starting graphite will be ever reconfigured to diamond in a man-made process.
This means your chips can literally rot (or get "septic") if their encasing is breached and bacterial nanowires short the parts of it. Shure, if the short circuit current is high, no problem (at least not a permanent one) it will fuse out, but if there are shorts between high impedance points...
Security thru obscurity is like trying to hide your fortification in the bush: it hides you, but you don't know how well and you don't know if your enemy uses your cover for undetected infiltration into your perimeter, too. In other words, you may have false sense of security or put too much unnecesary effort to maintain secrecy, ending in paranoia. Therefore it is good when you have clear situation and can focus on secrecy of only those things you need secretive.
That line of reasoning doesn't require FOSS, but it enables use of it, which on the positive side has:
wide support base,
wide knowledge/experts base,
usually the highest notch of "machine hours" of expirience (burn-in) compared to proprietary software,
no threat of vendor "evaporation",
generic permition to make own upgrades and customisations without delay and distribute them to installed base without additional royalities.
which are all considered A Good Thing.
OTOH, there'll most certainly be some software that, just like the latest SOTA ("State Of The Art") weapons, will need to be held far from the prying eyes, or written in such manner that all the sensitive parts, crucial to understanding principles behind them, are loaded as data (which would of course be held in secrecy, protected by encryption, etc.). Patents and copyright are not good enaugh protection in arms race - security thru secrecy is often needed or at least beneficial because of the surprise effect.
For every other purpose, military software is like military trucks: it should be reliable and robust and then when you know it doesn't have major flaws, there is not much about it that needs to be held a secret.
I had this idea for a totally virus-proof, malware-proof secure computing system. Basically, every single processor has a different instruction set. There's no way to run a binary compiled for anyone else's computer on yours, and no way for anyone except you to compile binaries that will run on your computer.
Actually, it is close to proprietary software vendors' dream, provided one small change is made to your devised system: "yes way" for someone( and you get to choose who) "to compile binaries that will run on your computer". That way unauthorised copying would be futile because you purchase binary executable software from a vendor for an unique machine.
It could be done (You see, I had an idea similar to yours): - The processor needs to internally decript each "machine code" binary executable chunk, prior to executing it, using private key / public key scheme.
- Public key is readable (or supplied by processor vendor) and you (the buyer) have to send it to (trusted, of course) software vendor when you purchase software (no shrink-wrapped distributions though, they need to encrypt it for each target, but it can be automated).
- You cannot decrypt it, as you don't have processor private key, so you can't crack it and re-encrypt it for others.
- Compilers you have installed are supplied with your processor's public key, or alternatively, you can feed them other processor's public key if you wish to write software for others' machines.
Of course, it is possible to tie (proprietary) compiler to host machine, but basically, you would have access to your processors public key, so nothing stops you from encrypting "open" machine code. Unless of course, if the processor vendor won't supply public key to end-users and instead shares it only with software vendors who have arangement with them, in which case you send software vendor your CPU ID so that they can get matching "public" key from processor vendor. Of course, it is not hard to predict that Big Brother would have access to this "public" keys as well, while processor ID's would be (and are today) easily obtained from programs running on them. Therefore, government agencies could make net-deliverable agent applets to run on your machine.
Now, that would be REALY evil (DRM/DMCA - spirit, anti-openness evil on n'th degree), but we can always whip up a FOSS interpreters and FOSS applications to run on top of that interpreters, as long as there is a way to obtain a (proprietary if nothing better) compiler for each machine. Alternatively, we must have a ready plan B: open source hardware platforms (CPU's and other system and data communication devices in programmable logic, etc.), or plan C: cyberpunk frankenputers made from old machines on steroids - clustered CPU's (probably of different generations and speed), expanding addressable memory space/hacking new technology memory modules into old computers,... eighties again!
And remember: upgrade early, so that your trusted, open, old machines don't wear out to much, as you may need them again sometime!
Apparently you misunderstood my post. Car insurance is there so that you can't say "Oups, I'm sorry, I damaged (or caused damge to) your new fancy car(s) with my rolling wreck here (may it rest in pieces now as it fell apart after we hit) but you see, I don't OWN enaugh of anything to make it up to you". So, in my country (and I am somehow sure that it is so in Sweeden and most other countries, too), insurance company will pay for the damage you caused on other's cars (and raise the amount you pay for insurance next time, as your odds are now lower).
However, that is of course, not all that you are due, although it is all that concernes insurance company.
In most cases, the accident is consequence of not observing the law that regulates rules of the road traffic. Therefore, if you caused a severe accident, it is very likely that you will be booked by traffic police and later summoned before magistrate court, where in most cases you will be ordered to pay fine, surrender your driving licence for fixed amount of time (in some countries even for good... or untill you pass drivers exam again). I am not quite sure (couldn't find the law on the web), but I believe that even if you didn't kill anyone, but "just" caused severe injury or endangered lives by extreme recklessness or disrespect to traffic safety regulations, you may be even sentenced to jail.
So, I never saw anyone beeing *arrested* by traffic police on the scene of accident, but if you were extremely dangerous driver, you may as well serve time by sentence of the magistrate. When you think about it, especially from the victims' viewpoint, the nature of (attempted) unintentional manslaughter or injury is not somehow less serious just because it takes place in context of traffic.
Hmm, what about obligatory car insurance? You pay up front insurance fee and if you are responsible for accident, insurance company pays for damage on other driver's car. If we follow that analogy with existing insurance policy, then they wouldn't pay your penalties (fines) mandated by law and ordered by judge in criminal process, only the damages RIAA sue you for, if they win, in civil litigation.
Logical next step is eliminating "acres" (2D constraint) from the equation and creating closed industrial intensive planting plants, ultimate greenhouses, a sort of botanical "The Matrix" world if you like... But, first it needs cheap energy supply. GM experts will at some point in time produce "electric plants" which will not require light as power source, or perhaps more probably a cross between fungi and photvores, so that we can raise green plants in total dark, using only pre-prepared synthetic nutrient substrate.
After that, only thing remaining to improve is to achieve direct synthesis of "organic-alike" food (giant rolls of "leaf" and coils of "stalk", cut out with cookie-cutters and glued with non-toxic edible adhesive). Before that, probably the intermediate refined food products such as flour, sugar and cooking oil will be the first to be massively directly fabricated without using live plants (or at least, live original plants).
The trouble with beachfront is... it is just a definite line! ANY change hurts it. If glaciers start spreading over land, tying more water in ice, sea level will fall and old beachfront ends miles in mainland.
Slim cases generally annoy me because I can't tell them apart by looking at their spines,
You can colour-code them, using coloured stickers or permanent markers. Other thing that comes to my mind is to DIY a device similar to slide-projector feeder (in line, not drum) that prods up one case a time so that you can see that half-inch wide clear part of case that can hold a paper ribbon with info on it. That way you would operate the lever and vrrrr, fast browse thru them (it is assumed that holder is horizontal, i.e. in a drawer ). Or, even simpler, if the rack is made such that it could be tilted back (or if bottom of the back of rack could be pulled forward so that only the back is tilted), to force cases form a staircase, you could see them all at once.
He did invest his talent, but he never invested in any of the risk. It's easy to put effort into an enterprise, doing the work etc. but until you decide to share in the risk then you don't have very much to negotiate with.
How exactly do you define risk? I don't think investors' lives or health was at risk, so let's assume you are talking about property loss risk. Well, most every property today comes from talent or effort and risk, either owners or owners' ancestors. What I am trying to prove here is that today's talent and effort, if not up front completely compensated can be considered an investment put to risk, too. Now, original poster obviously had some implied expectations, which were not upheld by any contractual instrument, that he will be rewarded more for his effort later on. Obviously, it was not realistic and so it didn't happen. Now, as present, post festum situation is all clear and obvious (to person submitting the question too), let's get back to the original question: what should had Woody Woodpecker done in the first place to avoid feeling crossed? I see three options:
lower the expectations, hold back enthusiasm and be cool. He may get fired early but what the heck, why break your back with extra, heroic work for offered average Joe's salary. Don't work with your heart or you'll end up with heart condition.
show awareness of the situation (if you're sure you've got it) and entrepreneurial spirit and negotiate for more, over the job-market price (higher salary or other compensation). Now, this calls for a change of sides for the moment to have a look from employers' angle: First, the job success is critical and most important thing for the investor. If he has poker players' nerves of steel, he may try to be cheap and try to get extra effort from "young, self-motivated person willing to advance career" (a sucker) with vague-hints-of-would-be-promises, like what actually happened to our friend here. Now, this weasel approach may and probably will work, unless there is a narrow closing window of opportunity for success of the business and adequate help haven't been acquired so far. If so, IF employer decided that it would not kill the deal to spend some more on key personnel salary, THEN there is a small matter of *guarantee* from employee to employer that extra money will be well-spent instead of just thrown away into pockets of lazy greedy slacking son of a... In other words, employee has to share burden of risk with employer so that employer would know that employee's work is worth some extra money (or whatever goodies like options, etc.). This line of reasoning naturally leads to putting cards on the table face up and seeing what each side has to offer: how much can employer share with employee and in exchange for what? What an employee can possibly and realistically promise to do "extra" that would affect the success of upstart business, which can not be purchased from another one ? What is employer planning? Perhaps everything can be OK, deadlines met even with regular (regular price/average employee) work? If, so and if You, like most of us, don't have more then one "gear" of work, then it is not a position for You and it is good to know it in advance, before too much work is sold for too little money.
Unethical (but hey, they WILL be unethical to YOU whenever they can get out with it) and perhaps illegal (depending on how hard you enforce it) one: if they haven't got a clue about your job, then make yourself indispensable by obscuring critical details of your work, "plan for obsolescence" in regular periods everything you do so that you know they will have to come to you again. However, that will not work if they sell the business to other company, unsuspecting of time bombs. They will laugh to both of you all the way to the bank.
...the ransack attack of the human space diaspora fraction gone militaristic, technologically advanced and greedy. At first, I thought: "Well, a virus can traverse to colonies, as people will travel to visit relatives or do business", when it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps it is actually ment to be a "never look back" voyage for space emigrants. Here on Earth, thruout history, the groups of humans, of the same specie, were constantly THE ultimate threat to each other, just because they were separated for a while and hence developed distinct group identities. It IS going to happen on the large scale if we colonize the space across large distances. The space aliens will be us.
Its proving very hard to built antennas that have constant gain over the whole BW
Uhh... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_periodic_antenna... T&M gear uses that type. They are not so much of a high directional gain, but they offer very flat frequency/gain characteristic. For GHz range it would be couple of inches for the largest dipole in the set. All in all, resonably good antena for this could be etched on a small PCB.
To what extent should resources be spent helping a weak individual survive. What is your definition of survival? We will all die at some point.
I agree for the most part of your analysis. The way I see it, there are only three possibilites:
We *will* all die at some point. We will *all* die at some point. We will all *die* at some point.
That is why the accent should be not on saving presentnly living on any cost, but on creating well ballanced (taking into account statsistical survivability...) number of new. The death, except incidental but I am talking about age related death is not obligatory for any living specie but it is obviously a result of evolution, it serves an important purpose: to toughen the specie, to try to solve any change in environment thru USE of evolution. If you live long and breed late, you (antropomorphysm of a specie) are wasting time, you are not evolving enaugh. Most survival-capable species are those that are short-lived with high reproductive rates, such as microroganisms, insects and rodents (or in general: The Pests).
Now, we clearly took different path, employing reasoning problem-solving to survival instead using good old raw power of evolution. About now we are starting to feel a little discomfort because perhaps there is no turning back: Should something (i.e, a large asteroid) shatter our complicated survival system, we may fall down beyond recovery and wanish.
OTOH, keeping all "the weak" as we do, provides us a lot of genetic diversity, which is A Good Thing for later when we get into trouble, eventually. Why let them die now, if some time later, some of their traits may have beneficial side effects? Anticipating what will and what won't be good somehow beats the point of evolution. If you personaly feel uncomfortable about "bad genes" polluting your trait, choose very carefully who you have children with. Find a mate of opposite sex who shares your attitude and you both scan your genomes for hidden problems. Don't press your preferences on everybody else. Besides, exploring deseases and gaining more knowledge can only strengthen us. The emotional drive to help and save our loved ones fuels the explorations in biology that will give us benefits reaching broader then medicine.
I have a hunch that this embrio cloning and stem cell research is just a temporary phase (like 19-century grave-robbing for anatomical research was) which will lead to deeper insight and capability to manipulate any cell and tissue type transformation and self-healing, organs regeneration, etc. Some of today's canibalistic (in technical sense of that word) treatments (transfusion, transplantation, stem-cell treatments) will be historical as much as blood-letting is today.
Actually it's more just like a car that can only be used on roadways
Wrong. It is more like a private train on the private railroad. Pretty lame, you can go only where there is railroad AND the train stop and only at certain times.
It is a good thing cars obey their drivers and most cars really can go off the road (provided terrain is not too rough or slippery). Cars are really quite versatile and I for one wouldn't like to own a car that isn't. Trigger locks are another bad example. It is not like the gun factory or the government has the key to a lock while the owner doesn't. Any technology that empowers individual owner is a good thing. I wouldn't want the possibility of someone sneaking into my house (or cabin while I am off) taking away one of my weapons and using it for a crime, or injuring oneself with it by reckless handling.
The DRM, on the contrary, is like the TV in Orwell's "1984". Someone else remotely controls my stuff and I am even forbidden to cut that someone out of the loop. It is like being forced by law to allow trespassing (of some lord's men) on your property. I don't need that and I don't want that. But, am I allowed to have a choice on that?
NASA should start process of ending the players carrier and moving into a carrier of a couch. Current monolithic structure needs to be "modularised" for interworking with other private and government parties interested in activities in or about outer space. Today there is a lot of interested and rich investors eager to get into space business. NASA should become something like space businesses launchpad - providing education (=SPAACE... ACADEMY!= - Navigation, Space Vessel Design and Manufacturing, Structural Engineering in Outer Space, Space Mission Management... ), expertise (design consulting) and independent testing of "spaceworthiness" of designs and procedures (sort of UL for outer space). It should devise distributed cooperating system, a network, of orbital and interplanetary flight control. In short, NASA should move on up the ladder and think bigger and further then their present activites, with accent of coordinating and supporting the others and it doesn't need to do it for free, either. Perhaps not all its expenses would be covered with income that it could realize this way, but OTOH, this plan involves abstaining from actual, most expensive, practical, activities. Present part of NASA that did actual manufacturing & assembly & launching should be "outsourced", privatised, sold to investors (but key experts should be kept in agency, as consultants and lecturers) and more such enterprises should be allowed to be founded, with hired help from new, reformed NASA.
The problem is in process of obtaining new antibiotics.
The Big Piture is: there is some (micro)organism out there which fights bacteria by producing some substance which bacteria don't seem to stand very well. The researchers come along, behold the successfulness of said organism fighting the bacteria, takes the snapshot of said substance and analyse its structure and principle of "work". Then, the chemical process is designed to synthetise that substance and adapt it for administering it to ill humans.
What is wrong with that? Well, we have a moving target, while using our weapons aimed at some fixed point where it incdentally was at the moment of discovery. The "bacteriophage therapy" works because you attack "moving target" with "homing missile". Like with antibiotics, every now and then you need to get "current" phages that adapted to the adapted bacteria.
So, we need to change a bit our method of finding new cures. Current research practice is equivalent of stone age foraging for food - it may happen as well that there will be days when you find nothing to eat. Instead, we need to farm our natural sources of antibiotics and introduce to them new "superbug" bacteria strains, select subset of producer organisms that survived and put up a good resistance to superbugs, saw and raise them, repeat,... The best thing would be to have "antibug farms" in hospitals, right in the trenches. Perhaps even the maintained high sterility of hospitals is part of the problem - as every competing or predator microorganism is wiped right out. Maybe hospitals should saw the spores of benign, nonpathogenic fast spreading microorganisms thru the ventilation system, so that every microscopic spot of possible breeding substrate is taken by known and "friendly" domestic bacteria (or mold).
Perhaps they could pick one of the too-high-level kernel functionalities, encapsulate it (untangle from other parts of kernel, make it like... a detachable module) and export it out of kernel (out of inner security ring), as some kind of "uber" process (having higher priority then any of the processes "proper"). Then repeat that for next such funcionality, untill kernel has no presumptions about hardware it runs on (like having a filesystem, for example), except for CPU and memory.
We already have this separation to some extent, at least in idea if not strictly enforced - loadable kernel modules are dressed to play nice - ask for registration to assume certain roles, use kernel system calls, but they are not treated with due suspicion, held beyond a protective fence to secure other parts of this elite circle of software (and even less for "dirty peasant" common processes which have no business with them).
You are of ccourse right about shorelines, but this mention of neolithic Baltic valley just made me think of something else: Ancient humans built their largest cities on the banks of great rivers in the middle of great aluvial plains. If Baltic was a valley, supposed cities would be found on along former river routes. Same goes for North Sea and definitely for part of Atlantic European continental shelf between England, France and Ireland...
In the past, that part of the world, due to mild climate (Golf stream?), richness in freshwater (Thames, Rhein, Sena, all merging in one huge river flowing SW along what is now known as English channel/Lamanche...) may had been agricultural hotspot and a site of one of the great ancient civilisations similar to ones we discovered in other great river valleys throughout the world. I guess they may had invested a lot in building irigation system and major cities, and probably fought the rising of the sea and loss of shoreline land,... untill they were overwhelmed and disaster claimed their whole world in one single event (i.e. a cyclone storm, or an earthquake shattering down most dykes and sea walls).
Perhaps that would be the basis of Plato's Atlantis legend... (as well as some medieval celtic legend of city of Ys) it is near the Mediteranian, it is beyond (from Greeks' perspective) Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), it had lot of good, arable land to support reach and mighty state, it must had ended catastrophically (because of trying to fight inevitable loss) and most importantly, for our (archeological) purposes, if it is there, it must have been burried very deep under thick layer of mud deposits by now, which is good explanation for why it evaded all our efforts to locate it, even using sofisticated equipment.
I wonder if that part of continental shelf was ever subject to geophonic searching for oil deposits? It seems like the only way to "peek" thru the aluvial deposits on the sea bottom. If this research was conducted, is there a clue hidden in raw data?
For a technology to mature, the way is paved with suboptimal experimental designs and "proofs of concept". The thing is, something may be bitched about and downgraded untill there is immediate, burning problem that needs to be addressed, such as oil shortage which is looming in not so distant future. Every problem addressed here can and will be solved when pressing needs arise. Right now, it seems like a solution for distant, someone else's problem (GHG emissions->melting polar caps->oceans rise, but no worries for some of us as we are on high enaugh ground) while, on the other hand, designers are obviously 'not meaning it seriously', or in other words they pity wackos with money to burn who will pay for these toys.
It should be noted that first gas cars where also hobists' toys, inefficient, unreliable, short radius authonomy and explosion-prone, but all the problems where gradually solved, one step a time. OTOH, internal combustion engine cars had no viable competition at the time (if we exclude trains, which were constrained to... railroads!). Today's performance is result of competition inside the same category. That is why their initial quirks where tolerated - they had no substitute.
Now, it is all like a sumo match - if you press hard enaugh, you will get what you want. If we are determined to press the electric cars, people will find it worthwile to spend some effort inventing solutions for its' present problems. You have noticed that Lithium batteries are response to problem of heaviweightness and bulkiness of acid-lead batteries, but instantly there comes the next problem - endurance of these new batteries. There is a number of other problems, such as recharging time, authonomy, scaleability (you cannot go to nearest battery station and buy just a little "juice" to get car there, or carry small canister in luggage compartment), that may need complete change of viewing point (micro or nano capsulled batteries,... ?).
Perhaps new cars will have modular engines, that would allow us to reconfigure and equip them differently for different uses, i.e. when commuting between work and home, use electric subsystem, but when you go on intercity trip, swap it with internal combustion module. Or, even better, make complete powertrain electrical and just swap main battery block with electric generator(, or fuel cell), depending on intended use or personal preference. Of course, there is downside: this would require you to own a garage, or else pay for changing services and rent-a-module.
Like every time before in tech history, military will be judge of what goes and what s(t)inks. When there is mil-grade electric vehicle in comission, there will be cheaper, less robust, fancier versions for civilian use. But, why would military do such thing? Well, for one, transport of energy supplies could potentially be cheaper, faster and more reliable then transport of fuel supplies. I mean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_power_tran smission). That would create enormous advantage for invasion forces, especially if chain of satellite relays is used to beam energy from homeland power grid up to the first satelite, then from satelite to satelite, then down to any arbitrary point on the surface of the Earth. Aside from military uses, a nation in possesion of such system could allow own electric power companies to export, sell energy to any other nation, or even make other nations totally dependent ("a hand on a switch" instead of "hand on a oil tap")to this nation, create advantage for national civil engineering corporations to win any bid anywhere because of the low logistics costs... I believe there is a lot of goodies involved in it for serious, resourceful powerseekers.
Slashdot Mirror
Region coding of any kind should be banned in the first place as it is a price discrimination scheme
... asking for wrong solution. Bots send spam to your comments log. How is it different from sending spam mail to your email address, once they learn about it? They earn money if they are successful, you gain nothing if they aren't. Therefore they can invest some of it in overcoming the barriers you put in their way.
:D (Bwahahahahuhuhahahaha, after going thru all that, they gave money for nothing, lol, rofl)
You can never win, but I suggest making it harder for them (hurting their profit): Unlike with email spam, they lose some money on human "burglars" and the process slows them a bit.
1) generate new ones at as high rate as possible - don't let them reuse one solution.
2) put multiple captchas ( a time-varying number, say... 1-3, so that hired solvers couldn't establish a rhytm - it'll get them tired sooner).
3) slow down both passing thru them and the posting process.
4) occasionally ask submitters to solve yet another captcha after the post was submitted.
5) And, most important, run adaptive (Bayesian) antispam filter on each submitted post and reject those who fail
Oh, I actually suggest that they should be honest, or fair, to be exact.
State their needs and let everyone compete (if the terms suit them).
Who can tell, perhaps Microsoft would donate their software to India's schools for free and open a lot of technology development centers in India so that they Indian programmers can influence the process of making it suitable for their own needs and with affordable price, too?
Outright closing the door in some potential contestants' faces is rude and irritating. Besides, the point to make is more...to the point, if it is made on failing to meet certain important terms of a contest i.e. openness, freedom. Other way, the point is only that point on top of the middle finger, which can be interpreted quite wrongly.
On a sidenote, I actually expect Microsoft to become great and successful provider of free software (you can laugh... for now), because the overall pressure is rising, the landscape is changing and they will certainly not just die without trying to adapt themselves. I mean, the businesses and governments which actually do buy their products would be happy to buy service from them too, even if they had the source code on their disposal, while significant majority of user base in the world use pirated copies anyway. They already have more to gain then to lose if they switch on the Freedom side (i.e. disarming and eradicating the competition
Remotely related to that (in case that other point is the one), you can be underhanded in your ends (in your mind) and yet completely honest in your conduct, break no rules, favorize none a priori, be up to your statements (just be sofisticated in making right statements). The world is full of such examples in politics and business. "Wheaseling" is the category term, is it not?
In this case, it is "small wheaseling" or "defense of the weak": frontal rejection of offer from a big, wealthy, powerful global company residing in, and financing thru taxes, world's strongest military superforce (and armory of your archenemy neighbour) on the grounds of: "we don't like you for what you are" is a slap in the face to that company and looking for trouble (more trouble, that is). Rumor has it that this company is underhanded itself. Faced with a "brick wall" political decision of an governmental body of a foreign country (which, rumor has it, has fine income from insourcing from company's domicile country), the company will certainly pull own strings at home, political and media connections to unleash some pressure on that foreign country and in this case there certainly is plenty of opportunities for that.
LAZ... er, I mean laziness!
...MAKE them come to their own conclusion? I mean, if you assign no money to buy software but FORBID under DRACONIAN measures use of pirated software and MANDATE that they must equip a number of computers, what else really they CAN do but download and install free software? Then they could boast around about their lawfull antipiracy policy instead of beeing accused of beeing anti-business.
...glove mouse? OK, I know it's an old idea, but now you can use it as ... a mouse... (duh), with a display on the back of your hand.
Therefore, it is assumed that you made a slight permutation in your comments: for a diamond, 4 sided grid cell is normal, 8 sided grid cell is not normal, but it would be normal for graphite, cheap mineral which is likely a base material for synthetic diamond. However, it is perhaps too much to expect that all the starting graphite will be ever reconfigured to diamond in a man-made process.
This means your chips can literally rot (or get "septic") if their encasing is breached and bacterial nanowires short the parts of it. Shure, if the short circuit current is high, no problem (at least not a permanent one) it will fuse out, but if there are shorts between high impedance points...
Security thru obscurity is like trying to hide your fortification in the bush: it hides you, but you don't know how well and you don't know if your enemy uses your cover for undetected infiltration into your perimeter, too. In other words, you may have false sense of security or put too much unnecesary effort to maintain secrecy, ending in paranoia. Therefore it is good when you have clear situation and can focus on secrecy of only those things you need secretive.
That line of reasoning doesn't require FOSS, but it enables use of it, which on the positive side has:
which are all considered A Good Thing.
OTOH, there'll most certainly be some software that, just like the latest SOTA ("State Of The Art") weapons, will need to be held far from the prying eyes, or written in such manner that all the sensitive parts, crucial to understanding principles behind them, are loaded as data (which would of course be held in secrecy, protected by encryption, etc.). Patents and copyright are not good enaugh protection in arms race - security thru secrecy is often needed or at least beneficial because of the surprise effect.
For every other purpose, military software is like military trucks: it should be reliable and robust and then when you know it doesn't have major flaws, there is not much about it that needs to be held a secret.
Actually, it is close to proprietary software vendors' dream, provided one small change is made to your devised system: "yes way" for someone( and you get to choose who) "to compile binaries that will run on your computer". That way unauthorised copying would be futile because you purchase binary executable software from a vendor for an unique machine.
It could be done (You see, I had an idea similar to yours):
- The processor needs to internally decript each "machine code" binary executable chunk, prior to executing it, using private key / public key scheme.
- Public key is readable (or supplied by processor vendor) and you (the buyer) have to send it to (trusted, of course) software vendor when you purchase software (no shrink-wrapped distributions though, they need to encrypt it for each target, but it can be automated).
- You cannot decrypt it, as you don't have processor private key, so you can't crack it and re-encrypt it for others.
- Compilers you have installed are supplied with your processor's public key, or alternatively, you can feed them other processor's public key if you wish to write software for others' machines.
Of course, it is possible to tie (proprietary) compiler to host machine, but basically, you would have access to your processors public key, so nothing stops you from encrypting "open" machine code. Unless of course, if the processor vendor won't supply public key to end-users and instead shares it only with software vendors who have arangement with them, in which case you send software vendor your CPU ID so that they can get matching "public" key from processor vendor. Of course, it is not hard to predict that Big Brother would have access to this "public" keys as well, while processor ID's would be (and are today) easily obtained from programs running on them. Therefore, government agencies could make net-deliverable agent applets to run on your machine.
Now, that would be REALY evil (DRM/DMCA - spirit, anti-openness evil on n'th degree), but we can always whip up a FOSS interpreters and FOSS applications to run on top of that interpreters, as long as there is a way to obtain a (proprietary if nothing better) compiler for each machine. Alternatively, we must have a ready plan B: open source hardware platforms (CPU's and other system and data communication devices in programmable logic, etc.), or plan C: cyberpunk frankenputers made from old machines on steroids - clustered CPU's (probably of different generations and speed), expanding addressable memory space/hacking new technology memory modules into old computers,
And remember: upgrade early, so that your trusted, open, old machines don't wear out to much, as you may need them again sometime!
Apparently you misunderstood my post. Car insurance is there so that you can't say "Oups, I'm sorry, I damaged (or caused damge to) your new fancy car(s) with my rolling wreck here (may it rest in pieces now as it fell apart after we hit) but you see, I don't OWN enaugh of anything to make it up to you". So, in my country (and I am somehow sure that it is so in Sweeden and most other countries, too), insurance company will pay for the damage you caused on other's cars (and raise the amount you pay for insurance next time, as your odds are now lower).
However, that is of course, not all that you are due, although it is all that concernes insurance company.
In most cases, the accident is consequence of not observing the law that regulates rules of the road traffic. Therefore, if you caused a severe accident, it is very likely that you will be booked by traffic police and later summoned before magistrate court, where in most cases you will be ordered to pay fine, surrender your driving licence for fixed amount of time (in some countries even for good... or untill you pass drivers exam again). I am not quite sure (couldn't find the law on the web), but I believe that even if you didn't kill anyone, but "just" caused severe injury or endangered lives by extreme recklessness or disrespect to traffic safety regulations, you may be even sentenced to jail.
So, I never saw anyone beeing *arrested* by traffic police on the scene of accident, but if you were extremely dangerous driver, you may as well serve time by sentence of the magistrate. When you think about it, especially from the victims' viewpoint, the nature of (attempted) unintentional manslaughter or injury is not somehow less serious just because it takes place in context of traffic.
Drive carefully.
Hmm, what about obligatory car insurance? You pay up front insurance fee and if you are responsible for accident, insurance company pays for damage on other driver's car. If we follow that analogy with existing insurance policy, then they wouldn't pay your penalties (fines) mandated by law and ordered by judge in criminal process, only the damages RIAA sue you for, if they win, in civil litigation.
Logical next step is eliminating "acres" (2D constraint) from the equation and creating closed industrial intensive planting plants, ultimate greenhouses, a sort of botanical "The Matrix" world if you like... But, first it needs cheap energy supply. GM experts will at some point in time produce "electric plants" which will not require light as power source, or perhaps more probably a cross between fungi and photvores, so that we can raise green plants in total dark, using only pre-prepared synthetic nutrient substrate. After that, only thing remaining to improve is to achieve direct synthesis of "organic-alike" food (giant rolls of "leaf" and coils of "stalk", cut out with cookie-cutters and glued with non-toxic edible adhesive). Before that, probably the intermediate refined food products such as flour, sugar and cooking oil will be the first to be massively directly fabricated without using live plants (or at least, live original plants).
The trouble with beachfront is... it is just a definite line! ANY change hurts it. If glaciers start spreading over land, tying more water in ice, sea level will fall and old beachfront ends miles in mainland.
...the ransack attack of the human space diaspora fraction gone militaristic, technologically advanced and greedy. At first, I thought: "Well, a virus can traverse to colonies, as people will travel to visit relatives or do business", when it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps it is actually ment to be a "never look back" voyage for space emigrants. Here on Earth, thruout history, the groups of humans, of the same specie, were constantly THE ultimate threat to each other, just because they were separated for a while and hence developed distinct group identities. It IS going to happen on the large scale if we colonize the space across large distances. The space aliens will be us.
...the game theory and probability enters the curriculum of law schools, ...
"Objection, Your Honour! Proposed game chances are biased against the defence."
I agree for the most part of your analysis. The way I see it, there are only three possibilites:
We *will* all die at some point.
We will *all* die at some point.
We will all *die* at some point.
That is why the accent should be not on saving presentnly living on any cost, but on creating well ballanced (taking into account statsistical survivability...) number of new. The death, except incidental but I am talking about age related death is not obligatory for any living specie but it is obviously a result of evolution, it serves an important purpose: to toughen the specie, to try to solve any change in environment thru USE of evolution. If you live long and breed late, you (antropomorphysm of a specie) are wasting time, you are not evolving enaugh. Most survival-capable species are those that are short-lived with high reproductive rates, such as microroganisms, insects and rodents (or in general: The Pests).
Now, we clearly took different path, employing reasoning problem-solving to survival instead using good old raw power of evolution. About now we are starting to feel a little discomfort because perhaps there is no turning back: Should something (i.e, a large asteroid) shatter our complicated survival system, we may fall down beyond recovery and wanish.
OTOH, keeping all "the weak" as we do, provides us a lot of genetic diversity, which is A Good Thing for later when we get into trouble, eventually. Why let them die now, if some time later, some of their traits may have beneficial side effects? Anticipating what will and what won't be good somehow beats the point of evolution. If you personaly feel uncomfortable about "bad genes" polluting your trait, choose very carefully who you have children with. Find a mate of opposite sex who shares your attitude and you both scan your genomes for hidden problems. Don't press your preferences on everybody else. Besides, exploring deseases and gaining more knowledge can only strengthen us. The emotional drive to help and save our loved ones fuels the explorations in biology that will give us benefits reaching broader then medicine.
I have a hunch that this embrio cloning and stem cell research is just a temporary phase (like 19-century grave-robbing for anatomical research was) which will lead to deeper insight and capability to manipulate any cell and tissue type transformation and self-healing, organs regeneration, etc. Some of today's canibalistic (in technical sense of that word) treatments (transfusion, transplantation, stem-cell treatments) will be historical as much as blood-letting is today.
It is a good thing cars obey their drivers and most cars really can go off the road (provided terrain is not too rough or slippery). Cars are really quite versatile and I for one wouldn't like to own a car that isn't. Trigger locks are another bad example. It is not like the gun factory or the government has the key to a lock while the owner doesn't. Any technology that empowers individual owner is a good thing. I wouldn't want the possibility of someone sneaking into my house (or cabin while I am off) taking away one of my weapons and using it for a crime, or injuring oneself with it by reckless handling.
The DRM, on the contrary, is like the TV in Orwell's "1984". Someone else remotely controls my stuff and I am even forbidden to cut that someone out of the loop. It is like being forced by law to allow trespassing (of some lord's men) on your property. I don't need that and I don't want that. But, am I allowed to have a choice on that?
NASA should start process of ending the players carrier and moving into a carrier of a couch. Current monolithic structure needs to be "modularised" for interworking with other private and government parties interested in activities in or about outer space. Today there is a lot of interested and rich investors eager to get into space business. NASA should become something like space businesses launchpad - providing education (=SPAACE... ACADEMY!= - Navigation, Space Vessel Design and Manufacturing, Structural Engineering in Outer Space, Space Mission Management... ), expertise (design consulting) and independent testing of "spaceworthiness" of designs and procedures (sort of UL for outer space). It should devise distributed cooperating system, a network, of orbital and interplanetary flight control. In short, NASA should move on up the ladder and think bigger and further then their present activites, with accent of coordinating and supporting the others and it doesn't need to do it for free, either. Perhaps not all its expenses would be covered with income that it could realize this way, but OTOH, this plan involves abstaining from actual, most expensive, practical, activities. Present part of NASA that did actual manufacturing & assembly & launching should be "outsourced", privatised, sold to investors (but key experts should be kept in agency, as consultants and lecturers) and more such enterprises should be allowed to be founded, with hired help from new, reformed NASA.
The problem is in process of obtaining new antibiotics.
... The best thing would be to have "antibug farms" in hospitals, right in the trenches. Perhaps even the maintained high sterility of hospitals is part of the problem - as every competing or predator microorganism is wiped right out. Maybe hospitals should saw the spores of benign, nonpathogenic fast spreading microorganisms thru the ventilation system, so that every microscopic spot of possible breeding substrate is taken by known and "friendly" domestic bacteria (or mold).
The Big Piture is: there is some (micro)organism out there which fights bacteria by producing some substance which bacteria don't seem to stand very well. The researchers come along, behold the successfulness of said organism fighting the bacteria, takes the snapshot of said substance and analyse its structure and principle of "work". Then, the chemical process is designed to synthetise that substance and adapt it for administering it to ill humans.
What is wrong with that? Well, we have a moving target, while using our weapons aimed at some fixed point where it incdentally was at the moment of discovery. The "bacteriophage therapy" works because you attack "moving target" with "homing missile". Like with antibiotics, every now and then you need to get "current" phages that adapted to the adapted bacteria.
So, we need to change a bit our method of finding new cures. Current research practice is equivalent of stone age foraging for food - it may happen as well that there will be days when you find nothing to eat. Instead, we need to farm our natural sources of antibiotics and introduce to them new "superbug" bacteria strains, select subset of producer organisms that survived and put up a good resistance to superbugs, saw and raise them, repeat,
Perhaps they could pick one of the too-high-level kernel functionalities, encapsulate it (untangle from other parts of kernel, make it like ... a detachable module) and export it out of kernel (out of inner security ring), as some kind of "uber" process (having higher priority then any of the processes "proper"). Then repeat that for next such funcionality, untill kernel has no presumptions about hardware it runs on (like having a filesystem, for example), except for CPU and memory.
We already have this separation to some extent, at least in idea if not strictly enforced - loadable kernel modules are dressed to play nice - ask for registration to assume certain roles, use kernel system calls, but they are not treated with due suspicion, held beyond a protective fence to secure other parts of this elite circle of software (and even less for "dirty peasant" common processes which have no business with them).
You are of ccourse right about shorelines, but this mention of neolithic Baltic valley just made me think of something else:
... untill they were overwhelmed and disaster claimed their whole world in one single event (i.e. a cyclone storm, or an earthquake shattering down most dykes and sea walls).
Ancient humans built their largest cities on the banks of great rivers in the middle of great aluvial plains. If Baltic was a valley, supposed cities would be found on along former river routes. Same goes for North Sea and definitely for part of Atlantic European continental shelf between England, France and Ireland...
In the past, that part of the world, due to mild climate (Golf stream?), richness in freshwater (Thames, Rhein, Sena, all merging in
one huge river flowing SW along what is now known as English channel/Lamanche...) may had been agricultural hotspot and a site of one of the great ancient civilisations similar to ones we discovered in other great river valleys throughout the world. I guess they may had invested a lot in building irigation system and major cities, and probably fought the rising of the sea and loss of shoreline land,
Perhaps that would be the basis of Plato's Atlantis legend... (as well as some medieval celtic legend of city of Ys) it is near the Mediteranian, it is beyond (from Greeks' perspective) Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), it had lot of good, arable land to support reach and mighty state, it must had ended catastrophically (because of trying to fight inevitable loss) and most importantly, for our (archeological) purposes, if it is there, it must have been burried very deep under thick layer of mud deposits by now, which is good explanation for why it evaded all our efforts to locate it, even using sofisticated equipment.
I wonder if that part of continental shelf was ever subject to geophonic searching for oil deposits? It seems like the only way to "peek" thru the aluvial deposits on the sea bottom. If this research was conducted, is there a clue hidden in raw data?
For a technology to mature, the way is paved with suboptimal experimental designs and "proofs of concept". The thing is, something may be bitched about and downgraded untill there is immediate, burning problem that needs to be addressed, such as oil shortage which is looming in not so distant future. Every problem addressed here can and will be solved when pressing needs arise. Right now, it seems like a solution for distant, someone else's problem (GHG emissions->melting polar caps->oceans rise, but no worries for some of us as we are on high enaugh ground) while, on the other hand, designers are obviously 'not meaning it seriously', or in other words they pity wackos with money to burn who will pay for these toys.
... railroads!). Today's performance is result of competition inside the same category. That is why their initial quirks where tolerated - they had no substitute.
... ?).
n smission). That would create enormous advantage for invasion forces, especially if chain of satellite relays is used to beam energy from homeland power grid up to the first satelite, then from satelite to satelite, then down to any arbitrary point on the surface of the Earth. Aside from military uses, a nation in possesion of such system could allow own electric power companies to export, sell energy to any other nation, or even make other nations totally dependent ("a hand on a switch" instead of "hand on a oil tap")to this nation, create advantage for national civil engineering corporations to win any bid anywhere because of the low logistics costs... I believe there is a lot of goodies involved in it for serious, resourceful powerseekers.
It should be noted that first gas cars where also hobists' toys, inefficient, unreliable, short radius authonomy and explosion-prone, but all the problems where gradually solved, one step a time. OTOH, internal combustion engine cars had no viable competition at the time (if we exclude trains, which were constrained to
Now, it is all like a sumo match - if you press hard enaugh, you will get what you want. If we are determined to press the electric cars, people will find it worthwile to spend some effort inventing solutions for its' present problems. You have noticed that Lithium batteries are response to problem of heaviweightness and bulkiness of acid-lead batteries, but instantly there comes the next problem - endurance of these new batteries. There is a number of other problems, such as recharging time, authonomy, scaleability (you cannot go to nearest battery station and buy just a little "juice" to get car there, or carry small canister in luggage compartment), that may need complete change of viewing point (micro or nano capsulled batteries,
Perhaps new cars will have modular engines, that would allow us to reconfigure and equip them differently for different uses, i.e. when commuting between work and home, use electric subsystem, but when you go on intercity trip, swap it with internal combustion module. Or, even better, make complete powertrain electrical and just swap main battery block with electric generator(, or fuel cell), depending on intended use or personal preference. Of course, there is downside: this would require you to own a garage, or else pay for changing services and rent-a-module.
Like every time before in tech history, military will be judge of what goes and what s(t)inks. When there is mil-grade electric vehicle in comission, there will be cheaper, less robust, fancier versions for civilian use. But, why would military do such thing? Well, for one, transport of energy supplies could potentially be cheaper, faster and more reliable then transport of fuel supplies. I mean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_power_tra