Now... imagine an internet where every American has to sign in with their real ID and only Americans could use American Internet resources.
Talk about increasing the us/them divide.
Of course, the US would force its trading partners (Australia would comply in a jiffy) to implement a compatible scheme, with the US having the right to examine the details whenever they wanted to. So now it's North America, Australia/NZ, Japan and Europe who are roped into "voluntary compliance". I'm sure there'd be a modified extradition treaty associated with this agreement too.
Since when have legitimate businesses allowed transactions with anonymous people? If you want my stuff, you have to pay for it, and I have to know to whom to send the stuff, and the banking system has to know whose account to debit before it can credit mine. Illegitimate businesses will continue not to require ID.
Your objection is nonsensical.
This is a bit of a straw man; I have no problem with a legitimate business knowing who I am... I get a little nervous when the government gets to know about every *potential* business transaction I make, however -- which is what this system would do.
See: this ID is virtually identical to the loyalty rewards cards that many businesses use nowadays; they're completely voluntary, but you don't get full access/all the deals/etc. without them, so everyone uses them.
Except in this case, instead of one company having a loyalty card and selling the data to marketing firms, you have the government having the loyalty card, and *all* online businesses using it. It's actually scarily similar to what's happening with FaceBook IDs (I've stumbled across a disturbingly large number of businesses recently that require you to hand over your facebook ID to access some of their site content).
ClosedTLD is licensed under a commercial license; OpenTLD is under GPLv3. Eventually these will likely fork (if anyone else adds code to the GPL'd version).
Ambrosia Software did a similar thing with Escape Velocity in the 90's -- if you used a pirated serial number, Cap'n Hector would raid you in-game and steal all your credits. I recall un-registering my game and entering a pirated serial just to experience this entertainment....
Also, his lawyer probably also explained to him that even if he did win, Sony would just turn around and appeal the verdict... and keep doing so for as long as needed. Sony could have kept the issue in the courts until Hotz died of old age, or until he decided to give up the fight and rejoin humanity.
One other thought... when the relative motion between you and the objects around you approaches the speed of light, isn't it true that the objects approaching you shorten while the ones moving away from you lengthen? And by objects, we're talking quantum objects, not physical objects? This means that the front of the rocket from an internal observer will appear to be closer to the front hangar door, where all space is shrunk... but it will appear farther from the rear hangar door.
Looking at it from a different perspective, this means that the rocket will appear to be in a different location at the same time from inside the rocket than from inside the hangar... which is exactly what we'd expect from time dilation.
The answer is simple; due to the speed of the rocket (or hangar), the neurons in the brain are unable to process the results before the explosion where all observers go up in a large fireball.
A more interesting one would be to place telemetric laser gates 10m on either side of the building and see if a remote observer is able to witness either being broken while the rocket is within the closed hangar;)
I used to have the same situation... At best, they could have figured out that my location was precisely 2084 miles away from Toronto. For reference, that could place me in 2 Canadian provinces, 2 Canadian territories, Mexico, Panama, or even Venezuela.
What you're calling "faith" is generally referred to as "blind faith." Faith in general embraces uncertainty and critical thinking just fine.
I think in some circles that eschew the use of the word except to denigrate others, or to define a clique, the word has been conflated with "the belief in something unexplainable." In reality, faith and trust go hand in hand; you trust the actor, you have faith in the action. It's what you do when one of these fails that separates science from mythology.
This word usage might seem like the same kind of splitting hairs as usage of hacker or pirate, but all three of these seem fairly important to those who identify themselves, or are identified by others using the word. If nobody agrees on a meaning, one group's social outlook becomes another group's abhorred parody of reality, simply because they're not, in fact, referring to the same characteristics.
Actually... that's a good point. We can currently alter relationships with other users on here, but it'd be interesting if we could "like" posts -- and see how that rating compared to regular moderation. You could even go so far as to say "5 friends, 10 friends of friends, 30 foes and 500 friends of foes liked this." Take it even further, and add "If you liked this comment, you may also like..." and provide a widget that lists comments/submissions liked by friends and friends of friends.
However, they *could* use the internet gaming community as a shadow ops. Sure, trained military are running the real battle, but the "sim" is providing similar data to the world at large (not exact, as that would have privacy issues). Then there are watchdog processes running that flag detections and "cool moves" made by the general public that aren't made internally, and they can use that data to improve their live ops with minimal lag.
You say you've never studied Organic Chem. You've seen what it has delivered. Prove to me that it has delivered what the OC scientists say it has delivered, and that this didn't come about some other way.
Unless you've actually verified the studies yourself, you're just engaging in specialized groupthink -- you have faith that the group of people involved in OC are being truthful in their studies and that their assumptions are correct.
After all... people "proved" for years that the sun went around the earth. Then someone proved that the earth went around the sun. Then someone posited relativity, and both postulates became "true" for a given reference point.
Science is nothing more than rigorous observation and testing sitting on top of a faith-based presumption.
For that matter, science means knowledge. What we often call "science" is the practice of the scientific method, which is knowledge-based investigation (knowing new things based solely on personal observation and existing knowledge, ignoring assumptions and presumptions). We have faith that our observations are accurate, and that our existing knowledge is at least accurate enough to posit a theory based on a describable hypothesis.
Sure, trust and faith are not the same thing. I trust my chair will hold me up because it has for years, and was designed for this purpose. I have faith that my chair will hold me up because that's what a chair is supposed to do. Eventually, it might not hold me up anymore. If it fails to, I will have neither trust or faith that it will the next time... but someone else might.
If your dad says he'll do something, you trust him to do it. If Sony says they'll do something, you have faith that they will.
seems to my memory the one in 2004 in indonesia wrapped around islands and got concentrated in some parts, dissipated in others, depending on the layout of the seabed and the channels. of course, somebody at UBC has probably devoted their entire professional career to that question already...
A number of people at uVic have I believe (can't recall the source material location offhand). The seabed in Indonesia is significantly different to that around Vancouver Island and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. However, at least one researcher disagrees:
To understand the threat to western Canada, it is important to understand the geological features off the coast of British Columbia. From northern Vancouver Island to northern California, the Cascadia subduction zone marks the boundary between the smaller offshore Juan de Fuca Plate that is sliding under the much larger North American Plate. The Cascadia subduction zone has the potential to generate very large earthquakes, with magnitude 9.0 or greater, if the fault ruptures over its entire area. The January 26, 1700, Cascadia earthquake produced a fault rupture with a length of 1000 km. This type of event is similar to the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake, were the fault ruptured along an estimated length of 1300 km. Interestingly, both subduction zones run predominantly in a north-south direction, thus having the potential to trigger major tsunamis in the east-west direction. For Cascadia, this means that tsunami waves would propagate towards Vancouver Island. Popular belief suggests that major nearby cities, including Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, and Portland, which are located on inland waterways rather than on the coast, would be sheltered from the full brunt of a tsunami wave. Meanwhile, numerical modeling has shown that tsunami waves would travel around Vancouver Island through diffraction and impact Victoria and Vancouver significantly (Xie et al., 2007). This is consistent with observations following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, particularly on the west coast of Sri Lanka which was devastated by the tsunami as a result of wave propagation and diffraction around the island. Therefore, a megathrust earthquake along the Cascadia subduction zone has the potential to generate a major tsunami which would travel into the Juan de Fuca Straight, affecting communities along its shores. Understanding the tsunami hazard is a major challenge in the design of near-shoreline structures. However, hazard maps, which would provide inundation depths and velocities for design in the case of a tsunami with a given magnitude and a given return period, are currently not available. At present, numerical modeling is employed to provide expected inundation depths for a given earthquake. Xie et al. (2007) conducted numerical modeling of tsunamis generated from a Cascadia Fault earthquake to assess the potential tsunami risk for western Canada. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake, similar to the event of 1700, was assumed in their model. The numerical model TSUNAMI N2 was employed. The model estimated a maximum wave run-up of 25 m along the western shore of Vancouver Island, with an estimated arrival time for the first wave of 1 hour and 20 minutes.
Portland, Seattle and Vancouver will likely have no support services for up to 6 months after "the big one", but they won't vanish.
Vancouver has already burned to the ground once and come back stronger than ever... and if you look at the geological substrate underneath, you'll see that large parts of the area will do just fine in a major earthquake. Nearby cities like Richmond and parts of Delta (which are built on delta silt) won't fare so well, but at least there won't be a tsunami to deal with; the ocean floor bottom's just not laid out right for it in the area.
There's no lack of water supply in the Pacific NW; the big issues will be cleaning up sewage contamination and gas leaks, and then ensuring food supply. This will take ~6 weeks to stabilize, during which time people will be under a LOT of hardship unless they've prepared for it to some degree.
Watching them feels a lot like watching that crazy high school science teacher who would have their students build bottle rockets or potato cannons.
Bottle rockets or potato cannons?
"That crazy high school science teacher" had us pair off to see who could make the most effective black powder... and tested (with everyone safely behind blast shields) how the interaction between all the alkali metals and H2O changes when you move from grams and litres to something several orders of magnitude larger....
Actually, what went on in my highschool science classes was very similar to what the Mythbusters do; weeks of boring prep, culminating in large explosions (or, sometimes, in HazMat evacuations as someone dropped the vial containing the highly toxic gas, etc.)
The thing I learned most in that class was proper handling procedure and cleanup for WHMIS materials.
I still remember the many ways to effectively use a fume hood, clean up toxic liquids, stay outside the blast radius of an active experiment, and what the A B and C stand for (and are useful for) on a fire extinguisher. Getting my Propane/Methane ticket was a breeze years later, because I already knew first hand exactly how those gases behave in differing situations:)
It should be noted that Jesus's rejection of authority and of any hierarchy of knowledge lines up quite nicely with the Hacker manifesto, with only minor differences (such as "there are many ways to do things, but only one which will get you where you want to go"). Christ was upset with the Pharisees because they didn't write clean (legal/social/religious) code. Despite what some in the Catholic church believe, Jesus did not assign all authority (and associated responsibility) in heaven and on earth solely to Peter (as the first "Pope").
The only problem with this is that the shows have to be static... which means the ads have to be static. Advertisers have gotten used to being able to switch their ads to fit the current climate, and distributors have got used to bidding wars on ad slots for primetime.
With torrents, this all vanishes. Once a show is torrenting, the ads are locked in, as you can't change the hash. This means that "Survivor: TiVo 2012" will always have the same already paid-for ads embedded, with no opportunity to re-sell that adspace. In 2016, those ads will make no money for the distributor, and they won't make much money for the advertiser either.
There are technical ways to overcome this, but the result would not be the current torrent system.
One idea is to do it with a dedicated client that would decrypt the torrents and use the ads as part of the decryption key. In order to decrypt the stream, you'd need the ad that was good for that time window, which you could torrent from the distributor. This isn't true DRM (everyone gets the key, so the ads only have to be watched once, and the content is available permanently), but if the player worked seamlessly enough, most people would just use it and not bother decrypting, editing, re-encoding and re-torrenting.
I understand the recording industry and actual careers like law are more than a little different, but just because someone has been working for McDonalds for a few years doesn't mean they're going to go work for KFC and actively sabotage them.
I think a better metaphor would be:
just because someone has been working for McDonalds for a few years doesn't mean they're going to go work for the Vegan Rights group and actively sabotage them.
Anyone really supporting Vegan Rights (whatever those would be) wouldn't last working in McDonalds for a few years. Anyone who could stomache it already has a non-partial worldview.
I just had an idea: why not try an experiment with a sunset clause? Allow ISPs to charge the companies we're trying to connect to... and require that the ISP provide its service for free to consumers if they do.
Yes, there are lots of issues with this, but most network traffic wouldn't really change all that much (it would cost comcast too much to charge the small fry), and the big service providers would end up paying to connect to consumers (they would get their access for free too, unless they run their own).
Completely different paradigm than we have now, but it might actually work just as well in the long run, with the downside that all costs would be completely hidden from the consumer (yes, they'd still be there).
Slashdot Mirror
Now... imagine an internet where every American has to sign in with their real ID and only Americans could use American Internet resources.
Talk about increasing the us/them divide.
Of course, the US would force its trading partners (Australia would comply in a jiffy) to implement a compatible scheme, with the US having the right to examine the details whenever they wanted to. So now it's North America, Australia/NZ, Japan and Europe who are roped into "voluntary compliance". I'm sure there'd be a modified extradition treaty associated with this agreement too.
Since when have legitimate businesses allowed transactions with anonymous people? If you want my stuff, you have to pay for it, and I have to know to whom to send the stuff, and the banking system has to know whose account to debit before it can credit mine. Illegitimate businesses will continue not to require ID.
Your objection is nonsensical.
This is a bit of a straw man; I have no problem with a legitimate business knowing who I am... I get a little nervous when the government gets to know about every *potential* business transaction I make, however -- which is what this system would do.
See: this ID is virtually identical to the loyalty rewards cards that many businesses use nowadays; they're completely voluntary, but you don't get full access/all the deals/etc. without them, so everyone uses them.
Except in this case, instead of one company having a loyalty card and selling the data to marketing firms, you have the government having the loyalty card, and *all* online businesses using it. It's actually scarily similar to what's happening with FaceBook IDs (I've stumbled across a disturbingly large number of businesses recently that require you to hand over your facebook ID to access some of their site content).
Oh, and a fork: https://github.com/pascalbertrand/OpenTLD/blob/osx-octave/ that supports OS X and uses Octave (open source) instead of Matlab. This means that the entire toolchain is now OSS, and compiles on OS X!
ClosedTLD is licensed under a commercial license; OpenTLD is under GPLv3. Eventually these will likely fork (if anyone else adds code to the GPL'd version).
More info (and code) for OpenTLD here:
http://groups.google.com/group/opentld
https://github.com/zk00006/OpenTLD
Ambrosia Software did a similar thing with Escape Velocity in the 90's -- if you used a pirated serial number, Cap'n Hector would raid you in-game and steal all your credits. I recall un-registering my game and entering a pirated serial just to experience this entertainment....
All they really need to do is buy Paypal.... that answers all 3 of your questions.
Also, his lawyer probably also explained to him that even if he did win, Sony would just turn around and appeal the verdict... and keep doing so for as long as needed. Sony could have kept the issue in the courts until Hotz died of old age, or until he decided to give up the fight and rejoin humanity.
Wouldn't this mean that jet fighters would experience less time than body builders?
One other thought... when the relative motion between you and the objects around you approaches the speed of light, isn't it true that the objects approaching you shorten while the ones moving away from you lengthen? And by objects, we're talking quantum objects, not physical objects?
This means that the front of the rocket from an internal observer will appear to be closer to the front hangar door, where all space is shrunk... but it will appear farther from the rear hangar door.
Looking at it from a different perspective, this means that the rocket will appear to be in a different location at the same time from inside the rocket than from inside the hangar... which is exactly what we'd expect from time dilation.
The answer is simple; due to the speed of the rocket (or hangar), the neurons in the brain are unable to process the results before the explosion where all observers go up in a large fireball.
A more interesting one would be to place telemetric laser gates 10m on either side of the building and see if a remote observer is able to witness either being broken while the rocket is within the closed hangar ;)
I used to have the same situation... At best, they could have figured out that my location was precisely 2084 miles away from Toronto. For reference, that could place me in 2 Canadian provinces, 2 Canadian territories, Mexico, Panama, or even Venezuela.
What you're calling "faith" is generally referred to as "blind faith." Faith in general embraces uncertainty and critical thinking just fine.
I think in some circles that eschew the use of the word except to denigrate others, or to define a clique, the word has been conflated with "the belief in something unexplainable." In reality, faith and trust go hand in hand; you trust the actor, you have faith in the action. It's what you do when one of these fails that separates science from mythology.
This word usage might seem like the same kind of splitting hairs as usage of hacker or pirate, but all three of these seem fairly important to those who identify themselves, or are identified by others using the word. If nobody agrees on a meaning, one group's social outlook becomes another group's abhorred parody of reality, simply because they're not, in fact, referring to the same characteristics.
by (1706743) and 4 others like this.
Actually... that's a good point. We can currently alter relationships with other users on here, but it'd be interesting if we could "like" posts -- and see how that rating compared to regular moderation. You could even go so far as to say "5 friends, 10 friends of friends, 30 foes and 500 friends of foes liked this." Take it even further, and add "If you liked this comment, you may also like..." and provide a widget that lists comments/submissions liked by friends and friends of friends.
However, they *could* use the internet gaming community as a shadow ops. Sure, trained military are running the real battle, but the "sim" is providing similar data to the world at large (not exact, as that would have privacy issues). Then there are watchdog processes running that flag detections and "cool moves" made by the general public that aren't made internally, and they can use that data to improve their live ops with minimal lag.
Now to play Devil's advocate ;)
You say you've never studied Organic Chem. You've seen what it has delivered. Prove to me that it has delivered what the OC scientists say it has delivered, and that this didn't come about some other way.
Unless you've actually verified the studies yourself, you're just engaging in specialized groupthink -- you have faith that the group of people involved in OC are being truthful in their studies and that their assumptions are correct.
After all... people "proved" for years that the sun went around the earth. Then someone proved that the earth went around the sun. Then someone posited relativity, and both postulates became "true" for a given reference point.
Science is nothing more than rigorous observation and testing sitting on top of a faith-based presumption.
For that matter, science means knowledge. What we often call "science" is the practice of the scientific method, which is knowledge-based investigation (knowing new things based solely on personal observation and existing knowledge, ignoring assumptions and presumptions). We have faith that our observations are accurate, and that our existing knowledge is at least accurate enough to posit a theory based on a describable hypothesis.
Sure, trust and faith are not the same thing. I trust my chair will hold me up because it has for years, and was designed for this purpose. I have faith that my chair will hold me up because that's what a chair is supposed to do. Eventually, it might not hold me up anymore. If it fails to, I will have neither trust or faith that it will the next time... but someone else might.
If your dad says he'll do something, you trust him to do it. If Sony says they'll do something, you have faith that they will.
seems to my memory the one in 2004 in indonesia wrapped around islands and got concentrated in some parts, dissipated in others, depending on the layout of the seabed and the channels. of course, somebody at UBC has probably devoted their entire professional career to that question already...
A number of people at uVic have I believe (can't recall the source material location offhand). The seabed in Indonesia is significantly different to that around Vancouver Island and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. However, at least one researcher disagrees:
From http://library.lanl.gov/tsunami/ts274.pdf:
To understand the threat to western Canada, it is important to understand the geological
features off the coast of British Columbia. From northern Vancouver Island to northern
California, the Cascadia subduction zone marks the boundary between the smaller offshore
Juan de Fuca Plate that is sliding under the much larger North American Plate. The
Cascadia subduction zone has the potential to generate very large earthquakes, with
magnitude 9.0 or greater, if the fault ruptures over its entire area. The January 26, 1700,
Cascadia earthquake produced a fault rupture with a length of 1000 km. This type of event
is similar to the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake, were the fault ruptured along an estimated
length of 1300 km. Interestingly, both subduction zones run predominantly in a north-south
direction, thus having the potential to trigger major tsunamis in the east-west direction. For
Cascadia, this means that tsunami waves would propagate towards Vancouver Island.
Popular belief suggests that major nearby cities, including Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, and
Portland, which are located on inland waterways rather than on the coast, would be
sheltered from the full brunt of a tsunami wave. Meanwhile, numerical modeling has shown
that tsunami waves would travel around Vancouver Island through diffraction and impact
Victoria and Vancouver significantly (Xie et al., 2007). This is consistent with observations
following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, particularly on the west coast of Sri Lanka
which was devastated by the tsunami as a result of wave propagation and diffraction around
the island. Therefore, a megathrust earthquake along the Cascadia subduction zone has the
potential to generate a major tsunami which would travel into the Juan de Fuca Straight,
affecting communities along its shores.
Understanding the tsunami hazard is a major challenge in the design of near-shoreline
structures. However, hazard maps, which would provide inundation depths and velocities
for design in the case of a tsunami with a given magnitude and a given return period, are
currently not available. At present, numerical modeling is employed to provide expected
inundation depths for a given earthquake. Xie et al. (2007) conducted numerical modeling
of tsunamis generated from a Cascadia Fault earthquake to assess the potential tsunami risk
for western Canada. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake, similar to the event of 1700, was assumed
in their model. The numerical model TSUNAMI N2 was employed. The model estimated a
maximum wave run-up of 25 m along the western shore of Vancouver Island, with an
estimated arrival time for the first wave of 1 hour and 20 minutes.
Portland, Seattle and Vancouver will likely have no support services for up to 6 months after "the big one", but they won't vanish.
Vancouver has already burned to the ground once and come back stronger than ever... and if you look at the geological substrate underneath, you'll see that large parts of the area will do just fine in a major earthquake. Nearby cities like Richmond and parts of Delta (which are built on delta silt) won't fare so well, but at least there won't be a tsunami to deal with; the ocean floor bottom's just not laid out right for it in the area.
There's no lack of water supply in the Pacific NW; the big issues will be cleaning up sewage contamination and gas leaks, and then ensuring food supply. This will take ~6 weeks to stabilize, during which time people will be under a LOT of hardship unless they've prepared for it to some degree.
I found I can drag the links to my tab bar to open them.
Watching them feels a lot like watching that crazy high school science teacher who would have their students build bottle rockets or potato cannons.
Bottle rockets or potato cannons?
"That crazy high school science teacher" had us pair off to see who could make the most effective black powder... and tested (with everyone safely behind blast shields) how the interaction between all the alkali metals and H2O changes when you move from grams and litres to something several orders of magnitude larger....
Actually, what went on in my highschool science classes was very similar to what the Mythbusters do; weeks of boring prep, culminating in large explosions (or, sometimes, in HazMat evacuations as someone dropped the vial containing the highly toxic gas, etc.)
The thing I learned most in that class was proper handling procedure and cleanup for WHMIS materials.
I still remember the many ways to effectively use a fume hood, clean up toxic liquids, stay outside the blast radius of an active experiment, and what the A B and C stand for (and are useful for) on a fire extinguisher. Getting my Propane/Methane ticket was a breeze years later, because I already knew first hand exactly how those gases behave in differing situations :)
The Romans did not approve of his breaking of DRM so they crucified him. This tradition has endured even today.
Deity Rights Management?
It should be noted that Jesus's rejection of authority and of any hierarchy of knowledge lines up quite nicely with the Hacker manifesto, with only minor differences (such as "there are many ways to do things, but only one which will get you where you want to go"). Christ was upset with the Pharisees because they didn't write clean (legal/social/religious) code. Despite what some in the Catholic church believe, Jesus did not assign all authority (and associated responsibility) in heaven and on earth solely to Peter (as the first "Pope").
The only problem with this is that the shows have to be static... which means the ads have to be static. Advertisers have gotten used to being able to switch their ads to fit the current climate, and distributors have got used to bidding wars on ad slots for primetime.
With torrents, this all vanishes. Once a show is torrenting, the ads are locked in, as you can't change the hash. This means that "Survivor: TiVo 2012" will always have the same already paid-for ads embedded, with no opportunity to re-sell that adspace. In 2016, those ads will make no money for the distributor, and they won't make much money for the advertiser either.
There are technical ways to overcome this, but the result would not be the current torrent system.
One idea is to do it with a dedicated client that would decrypt the torrents and use the ads as part of the decryption key. In order to decrypt the stream, you'd need the ad that was good for that time window, which you could torrent from the distributor. This isn't true DRM (everyone gets the key, so the ads only have to be watched once, and the content is available permanently), but if the player worked seamlessly enough, most people would just use it and not bother decrypting, editing, re-encoding and re-torrenting.
I understand the recording industry and actual careers like law are more than a little different, but just because someone has been working for McDonalds for a few years doesn't mean they're going to go work for KFC and actively sabotage them.
I think a better metaphor would be:
just because someone has been working for McDonalds for a few years doesn't mean they're going to go work for the Vegan Rights group and actively sabotage them.
Anyone really supporting Vegan Rights (whatever those would be) wouldn't last working in McDonalds for a few years. Anyone who could stomache it already has a non-partial worldview.
Possibly the same issue here.
I just had an idea: why not try an experiment with a sunset clause? Allow ISPs to charge the companies we're trying to connect to... and require that the ISP provide its service for free to consumers if they do.
Yes, there are lots of issues with this, but most network traffic wouldn't really change all that much (it would cost comcast too much to charge the small fry), and the big service providers would end up paying to connect to consumers (they would get their access for free too, unless they run their own).
Completely different paradigm than we have now, but it might actually work just as well in the long run, with the downside that all costs would be completely hidden from the consumer (yes, they'd still be there).
...and what better way to do this than by seeding all the carriers with routers that call home to the FCC with live metrics?