the dollar is already partially digital, no more real than bitcoins.
The dollar is more real than bitcoins because the people who account for digital transactions in dollars aren't so baffled by their own system that they think it's anonymous.
There is probably room for quadrillions of humans living in space habitats just around the local solar system, so we are nowhere near the carrying capacity of the solar system for human life and life we bring with us, even just considering current or near-future-term technologies. The biggest problem of industrialized societies is actually declining populations... http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004174.html
With "free energy," yes - if we're using coal and oil to make chemical rockets, we'd need to double planet-wide CO2 release for a decade to even start a decent sized space habitat project.
Space elevators (still fantasy in the materials, and energy transmission realms) would help.
A moon base would help.
Practical cold fusion, or anything that delivers on the promises of cold fusion, would nail it.
Personally, I like the currently proposed "all of the above" strategy for future energy development, it's not a clearly focused sound-bite message like "drill, baby, drill" but I think it is a direction with much more chance of a good long-term future.
Perhaps, the hype seems to sell on the idea that it's just too complicated to keep track of all that stuff, "man, it makes my head spin, so they can't possibly figure out who I am..."
Whether or not they are running a tracking ID system, they have all the information required to do so if they chose to.
Like the "Thousand points of light" that were offered up when the "trickle down" never came?
empowered by robotics and advanced materials and LENR and dirt-cheap solar panels?
I work at a robotics company, robots aren't really cheap yet - they don't fix themselves. Have a roomba? I do, and I'd rate it as about 20% more efficient at cleaning our floor than a conventional vacuum (in terms of human time invested), it still needs a lot of attention, service, and frequent replacement, often within the warranty period.
Advanced materials are mostly scarce, fiber optics being one notable exception, but even carbon fiber is still at a premium after more than a decade of industrial scale use. Dirt cheap solar panels are currently inefficient enough that return on human hours invested in installation and maintenance is poor as compared to running a conventional grid hookup, even if you have to pay for the last mile or two of wire.
most peolpe's biggest problem in the USA is having too much stuff.
True enough, robots are great at making trinkets, you can buy a truckload of plastic crap for what it costs to fill the truck with gasoline anymore.
1% of the population can produce enough food via farming for everyone
Food production and distribution carries significant energy costs. Same for building materials.
So, why do we need these "chits" you're talking about and worried about people "cheating" with?:-)
Although I don't see why anyone would even bother, when they could just ask their neighbor to print them a new 3D printer and some solar panels and a matter extractor device if theirs broke for some reason.:-) Maybe we are not there now, but we may be in 20 years or so?
Only when energy is free + another 20 years to build out the infrastructure to distribute it.
We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity
The economy will never be "post-scacity", as there's only so much shoreline property. There will always be desireable stuff that is scarce
Both statements are true... we are starting to share some things for trivial cost, like long distance communication, you used to get effective ~10Kbaud for $20/hour, now you get 5MB/s for $30/month - and this has led to "free" encyclopedias and other very valuable things.
I hope to see a world where this kind of cost reduction can extend to things like staple foods, long distance transportation, etc. "Free" energy will be the key to that, the way that a fiber-optic infrastructure was the key to "free" exchange of information.
:-) We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity (including fiat currencies) at the heart of a 21st century abundance-oriented economy.
The only reason AC is anonymous on/. is because they choose to throw away your IP address after you've submitted your post, at least I think they do, otherwise, you're traceable.
Yes, IP addresses can be spoofed, but only because nobody cares if they are.
People will care if money transactions are spoofed. Maybe Bitcoin servers actually threw away their traceability information on the account creators, but I doubt a "real" government backed system ever would. You certainly can't open a bank account in the U.S. anymore without a virtual background check.
Bob wants to give Joe $10 for a cool Commodore 64 and there's no paper currency in the economy. So, Bob has his smart card and puts it into a dumb, untrusted reader. The reader device asks how much to transfer. Joe then sticks his card in and like magic $10 in value is added to Joe's card and Bob's is credited with no network connection. Can the transaction be fed back to some server? Depends on the electronic purse. Can you have a relatively anonymous system that works? Yes.
Can Bob hack his smart card to give the same $10 to Suzy for other good and valuable consideration? Yes. Will Bob and Suzy be pissed off at Bob when they find out that he has handed them copies of the same $10 "digital cash"? Of course. If Bob's real name is Steve and he's just skipped out to Mexico, do you feel like your "untraceable electronic cash" is very secure?
If it's a system without auditable transactions, it's already broken, you just need to keep a copy of your "digitally signed money" and use it again. If you're truly anonymous, nobody can tell which copy of the money is "real."
If it's a traceable, auditable system like today's bank-wire transactions, you can break it, but they'll catch you as soon as they check the transaction, which I believe takes less than a second. The cryptography is just to keep the rabble out, the real security is in the accounting.
Bank transactions rely on open audits between the trading partners... you can't just say "hey, some guy just gave me $5M", you have to be able to verify where it came from, otherwise "some guy" can give the same $5M to 5 different banks.
My computer (and yours) can make a perfect copy of any string of 0s and 1s.
So-called digital cash relies on either special, supposedly un-copyable by the masses, hardware, such as in today's paper money, or traceable transactions recorded by trusted servers, such as today's bank to bank wire transfers.
If the traceability is implemented by the government, you can be sure that it will be accessible for "matters of national security," just as today's banking transactions are. The only way to make a secure transaction untraceable is to give something un-copyable to the parties doing the trading.
Have you ever used maemo or meego? Maemo is perfect for developers/geeks. Meego is perfect for everyone else. All the backends/insides are the same, BTW.
They didn't even need to change platform, just keep doing what they were doing already.
I was wishing they would see this route through, but that wouldn't have gotten them a tie-in with a "real" desktop, you know, a desktop that hundreds of millions of people use daily... that's hard to ignore.
My best hope for Windows phone is that it is being developed with full knowledge of the shortcomings of Android and iOS, and the presently available tech that Android and iOS had to launch without.
Of course, it's a tougher problem to solve- doing Android and iOS one better, compared to just throwing something out there and saying "it's a 1.0, it'll get better..."
1. Continue on their own with Symbian/Meego/Maemo or whatever they develop in house and try to carve out a niche for a 4th (or 5th depending on how you count) OS in an already highly competitive market.
Given that they are really the only manufacturer making a serious play with Windows Phone, they were still in this position of trying to carve a market for a niche OS.
With the help of Microsoft pushing Windows 8 on the desktop, apparently with a tighter integration to phones than OS-X/iOS.
It was too easy a target to pass up. Personally, I like to be able to move my chair from side to side of my 60" desk, and push back so I can stand up... add the luxury of walking behind the chair (standard 30" passageway), and you need at least 42"x60" floorspace that is not-desk, makes a total of 30 square feet. What I failed to mention about our home office is that it also serves to store physical inventory, thus explaining the additional 30 square feet we are claiming.
I'm not sure why working from home is such a "big deal". Our farming ancestors (or tailers, bakers, storeowners, etc) did it for 5000+ years. It's normal.
They didn't have fossil fuel powered cars and asphalt roads... it's a conspiracy, man, big oil is manipulating the government to make you drive to work;-)
Hey, and you can have meetings at Starbucks, too... $10 for 3 lattes is a hell of a lot cheaper than renting a fleabag office downtown.
Turbotax is getting a little clearer about the home office thing - it doesn't have to have 4 walls and a door anymore. We're claiming 60 square feet of a 120sq ft room as office space - anybody who thinks a functional office requires less than 60 square feet must be completely out of touch with reality, you know, like an IRS auditor...
All very true, but... if you're tracking seagull sized drones, you'll be tracking all the seagulls too, and a ship that carries a radar tracking 5" shell battery isn't all that cheap to deploy. Not saying the drones are all that cheap either, yet, but they will continue to drop in cost until they're sub $1K soon, a ship with a 5+ man crew will never cost less than $1K for a day at sea.
Key point, a drone carrying a RaspberryPi could be very small, smaller than many seabirds.
So a shotgun should be sufficient.
Sure, if you've got a pattern tight enough to hit something a mile up.
Or, if you're chasing it down with a conventional aircraft and pointing your 12 gauge out the window, bear in mind that the mini-drone is probably cruising a good 30 knots below your stall speed.
Slashdot Mirror
the dollar is already partially digital, no more real than bitcoins.
The dollar is more real than bitcoins because the people who account for digital transactions in dollars aren't so baffled by their own system that they think it's anonymous.
There is probably room for quadrillions of humans living in space habitats just around the local solar system, so we are nowhere near the carrying capacity of the solar system for human life and life we bring with us, even just considering current or near-future-term technologies. The biggest problem of industrialized societies is actually declining populations...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004174.html
With "free energy," yes - if we're using coal and oil to make chemical rockets, we'd need to double planet-wide CO2 release for a decade to even start a decent sized space habitat project.
Space elevators (still fantasy in the materials, and energy transmission realms) would help.
A moon base would help.
Practical cold fusion, or anything that delivers on the promises of cold fusion, would nail it.
Personally, I like the currently proposed "all of the above" strategy for future energy development, it's not a clearly focused sound-bite message like "drill, baby, drill" but I think it is a direction with much more chance of a good long-term future.
The effect of too much dope? :-)
Perhaps, the hype seems to sell on the idea that it's just too complicated to keep track of all that stuff, "man, it makes my head spin, so they can't possibly figure out who I am..."
Whether or not they are running a tracking ID system, they have all the information required to do so if they chose to.
Why not just have a gift economy
Like the "Thousand points of light" that were offered up when the "trickle down" never came?
empowered by robotics and advanced materials and LENR and dirt-cheap solar panels?
I work at a robotics company, robots aren't really cheap yet - they don't fix themselves. Have a roomba? I do, and I'd rate it as about 20% more efficient at cleaning our floor than a conventional vacuum (in terms of human time invested), it still needs a lot of attention, service, and frequent replacement, often within the warranty period.
Advanced materials are mostly scarce, fiber optics being one notable exception, but even carbon fiber is still at a premium after more than a decade of industrial scale use. Dirt cheap solar panels are currently inefficient enough that return on human hours invested in installation and maintenance is poor as compared to running a conventional grid hookup, even if you have to pay for the last mile or two of wire.
most peolpe's biggest problem in the USA is having too much stuff.
True enough, robots are great at making trinkets, you can buy a truckload of plastic crap for what it costs to fill the truck with gasoline anymore.
1% of the population can produce enough food via farming for everyone
Food production and distribution carries significant energy costs. Same for building materials.
So, why do we need these "chits" you're talking about and worried about people "cheating" with? :-)
Although I don't see why anyone would even bother, when they could just ask their neighbor to print them a new 3D printer and some solar panels and a matter extractor device if theirs broke for some reason. :-) Maybe we are not there now, but we may be in 20 years or so?
Only when energy is free + another 20 years to build out the infrastructure to distribute it.
We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity
The economy will never be "post-scacity", as there's only so much shoreline property. There will always be desireable stuff that is scarce
Both statements are true... we are starting to share some things for trivial cost, like long distance communication, you used to get effective ~10Kbaud for $20/hour, now you get 5MB/s for $30/month - and this has led to "free" encyclopedias and other very valuable things.
I hope to see a world where this kind of cost reduction can extend to things like staple foods, long distance transportation, etc. "Free" energy will be the key to that, the way that a fiber-optic infrastructure was the key to "free" exchange of information.
:-) We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity (including fiat currencies) at the heart of a 21st century abundance-oriented economy.
Cory Doctorow, is that you?
You can't be anonymous (disconnected) while at the same time expect digital currency to remain globally consistant and secure. It's an oxymoron.
It's the dopeler effect, an idea sounds bright and plausible if it's coming at you fast enough.
I continue to be astounded by the number of people who go on and on about how secure and simultaneously anonymous Bitcoin is...
Clue people: your Bitcoins are only as anonymous as the server allows you to be when opening an account.
Anybody cashing out Bitcoin for cash (or gold bullion) mailed to a P.O. Box? I didn't think so.
The only reason AC is anonymous on /. is because they choose to throw away your IP address after you've submitted your post, at least I think they do, otherwise, you're traceable.
Yes, IP addresses can be spoofed, but only because nobody cares if they are.
People will care if money transactions are spoofed. Maybe Bitcoin servers actually threw away their traceability information on the account creators, but I doubt a "real" government backed system ever would. You certainly can't open a bank account in the U.S. anymore without a virtual background check.
Bob wants to give Joe $10 for a cool Commodore 64 and there's no paper currency in the economy. So, Bob has his smart card and puts it into a dumb, untrusted reader. The reader device asks how much to transfer. Joe then sticks his card in and like magic $10 in value is added to Joe's card and Bob's is credited with no network connection. Can the transaction be fed back to some server? Depends on the electronic purse. Can you have a relatively anonymous system that works? Yes.
Can Bob hack his smart card to give the same $10 to Suzy for other good and valuable consideration? Yes. Will Bob and Suzy be pissed off at Bob when they find out that he has handed them copies of the same $10 "digital cash"? Of course. If Bob's real name is Steve and he's just skipped out to Mexico, do you feel like your "untraceable electronic cash" is very secure?
I don't.
If it's a system without auditable transactions, it's already broken, you just need to keep a copy of your "digitally signed money" and use it again. If you're truly anonymous, nobody can tell which copy of the money is "real."
If it's a traceable, auditable system like today's bank-wire transactions, you can break it, but they'll catch you as soon as they check the transaction, which I believe takes less than a second. The cryptography is just to keep the rabble out, the real security is in the accounting.
Bank transactions rely on open audits between the trading partners... you can't just say "hey, some guy just gave me $5M", you have to be able to verify where it came from, otherwise "some guy" can give the same $5M to 5 different banks.
My computer (and yours) can make a perfect copy of any string of 0s and 1s.
So-called digital cash relies on either special, supposedly un-copyable by the masses, hardware, such as in today's paper money, or traceable transactions recorded by trusted servers, such as today's bank to bank wire transfers.
If the traceability is implemented by the government, you can be sure that it will be accessible for "matters of national security," just as today's banking transactions are. The only way to make a secure transaction untraceable is to give something un-copyable to the parties doing the trading.
If it's secure, it's traceable, otherwise you can duplicate it.
The windows mobile sales are a clear indicator that Nokia is on the road to destruction anyways. Why not risk it?
See where this road leads by 2014.... iOS didn't take the world over in a single quarter.
Have you ever used maemo or meego?
Maemo is perfect for developers/geeks.
Meego is perfect for everyone else.
All the backends/insides are the same, BTW.
They didn't even need to change platform, just keep doing what they were doing already.
I was wishing they would see this route through, but that wouldn't have gotten them a tie-in with a "real" desktop, you know, a desktop that hundreds of millions of people use daily... that's hard to ignore.
My best hope for Windows phone is that it is being developed with full knowledge of the shortcomings of Android and iOS, and the presently available tech that Android and iOS had to launch without.
Of course, it's a tougher problem to solve- doing Android and iOS one better, compared to just throwing something out there and saying "it's a 1.0, it'll get better..."
As far as I can tell, they are still making Symbian and MeeGo products, but clearly their emphasis seems to be Windows.
1. Continue on their own with Symbian/Meego/Maemo or whatever they develop in house and try to carve out a niche for a 4th (or 5th depending on how you count) OS in an already highly competitive market.
Given that they are really the only manufacturer making a serious play with Windows Phone, they were still in this position of trying to carve a market for a niche OS.
With the help of Microsoft pushing Windows 8 on the desktop, apparently with a tighter integration to phones than OS-X/iOS.
Desktop PCs and printers:
Buggy whips and horse shoes?
Fat collars and bell bottoms?
Sextants and paper charts?
(He quipped while typing on his desktop PC and printing the morning meeting agenda...)
It was too easy a target to pass up. Personally, I like to be able to move my chair from side to side of my 60" desk, and push back so I can stand up... add the luxury of walking behind the chair (standard 30" passageway), and you need at least 42"x60" floorspace that is not-desk, makes a total of 30 square feet. What I failed to mention about our home office is that it also serves to store physical inventory, thus explaining the additional 30 square feet we are claiming.
All in fun, I assure you.
"anybody who thinks a functional office requires less than 60 square feet must be completely out of touch with reality"
I've worked from a 5ft by 2.5ft desk for the last four years. Yes, that's my entire work area.
Before that, I worked from one half of the same desk.
You sit on top of the desk?
I'm not sure why working from home is such a "big deal". Our farming ancestors (or tailers, bakers, storeowners, etc) did it for 5000+ years. It's normal.
They didn't have fossil fuel powered cars and asphalt roads... it's a conspiracy, man, big oil is manipulating the government to make you drive to work ;-)
Hey, and you can have meetings at Starbucks, too... $10 for 3 lattes is a hell of a lot cheaper than renting a fleabag office downtown.
Turbotax is getting a little clearer about the home office thing - it doesn't have to have 4 walls and a door anymore. We're claiming 60 square feet of a 120sq ft room as office space - anybody who thinks a functional office requires less than 60 square feet must be completely out of touch with reality, you know, like an IRS auditor...
All very true, but... if you're tracking seagull sized drones, you'll be tracking all the seagulls too, and a ship that carries a radar tracking 5" shell battery isn't all that cheap to deploy. Not saying the drones are all that cheap either, yet, but they will continue to drop in cost until they're sub $1K soon, a ship with a 5+ man crew will never cost less than $1K for a day at sea.
And, think of the cottage industry that collects the raining hardware and recycles it...
Key point, a drone carrying a RaspberryPi could be very small, smaller than many seabirds.
So a shotgun should be sufficient.
Sure, if you've got a pattern tight enough to hit something a mile up.
Or, if you're chasing it down with a conventional aircraft and pointing your 12 gauge out the window, bear in mind that the mini-drone is probably cruising a good 30 knots below your stall speed.