I am thinking of a tower of about 20 - 30 meters (100 feet) from empty plastic bottles. I am trying to use a thin rope to fix bottles together. But I cannot find a solution to make such a tower rigid enough.
I need this tower to make photos of buildings from above. Commercial photo towers are expensive and bulky. But plastic bottles are compact and easily transportable.
I feel that it can be done as these bottles are enough strong and rigid. The question is how to fix them together to make a tower?
It is a modest task in comparison with 20 km tower, but it would be extremely practical open source invention as these bottles are available in abundance. Maybe if we can invent a 30 meters tower, we can then invent 30 kilometer open source tower.
I would suggest to ban by an international law all military robots. While there are not so many of them yet. It would be more difficult and expensive when there are armies of millions military robots.
The definition is simple: no military equipment without a responsible human physically attached to it.
In the 50s it would have been much easier to ban nuclear weapons while there were only few of them around, not hundreds of thousand as it is now.
The robot war machines will be the next generation of weapons of mass destruction.
Soon we will see swarms of poisonous digital mosquitoes, mechanical snakes with nuclear warheads, which can enter the land unnoticed, robot-fish, which enters a lake via a small river and poisons the whole lake, and so on and so forth.
For some mountaineers in Eurasia it is already a daily reality. Flying computers attack their village meetings, weddings, etc. killing and wounding dozens in each attack.
As soon as these flying computerized devices are becoming enough numerous hackers will start to pay an attention to them. Because it is nothing but a computer, webcam, mike, wireless modem, hard disk, OS, BIOS, etc.
We may see soon flocks of such volitant robots overtaken by bots or malware taking course on major European and American cities. Rocket attacks by flying robots will become the same daily reality for city dwellers as spam, DDoS attacks, etc.
Bicycle increases a commuting distance from 2.5 km to 17 km. If I had to live in an area where there are nor trams, buses, cars, etc., I would make sure that I owned at least a bicycle.
I guess that these are the secondhand bicycles, which arrive to that parts the same way as old computers arrive to places where people burn plastic in open fires to get some cooper out. Probably no way to count them properly.
These areas are well suited for cycling as there are no rain for months in a row.
I've met figures that it is bicycle. Mainly due to India, China, Bangladesh, etc.
For how many people cargo is transported by shipping? For some mission of decadents in Europe and North America, that's all. But bicycle is a transporter for billions, for the bulk of humanity.
When the first steel plows appeared the slave owners went bankrupt. A farmer with a steel plow and other steel tools could produce more and cheaper than a slave owner's enterprise. The demise of slavery still took many centuries. And yet in some parts of the world there are pockets of it even now.
However, the appearance of the steel plow caused abrupt fundamental changes in the bulk of civilization. In fact, it exploded it from within. It cause the appearance of a new philosophy and moral (Christianity). A farmer did not need cruel guards to make work a bunch of slaves with bronze hoes. It also caused absolutely new economical relations.
So, a new, more productive tool, a base, changes not only a facade or some players, the whole thing, the whole deal is changing. We have no way of knowing what it will be, because it will be some smart talented people, who will figure out how to achieve a market victory with these tools.
Until 15th century, until an invention of printing press, books were extremely expensive. One book cost more than several cows. A book was written by hand then, pictures in a book were drawn also by hand.
Printing press made books dirt cheap. But not all was good about it. The first bestselling author was Martin Luther.
Printing press appeared in 1440, the Martin Luther's first bestseller appeared in 1517, 77 years after.
The result was reformation and religious wars. Internet is only about 15 years old. What will happen 77 years after its invention?
But something will happen for sure, as the change in the base does cause changes in the social and economical relations. Sony and the likes' problems are the smallest part of it. The whole thing will change, as the invention is so fundamental. Hopefully there will be no analogs of reformation wars though, which, as I wrote already, were also caused by an invention and its widespread adoption.
I can break with a sledgehammer any door, even reinforced. Just give me ten minutes, good sledgehammer, and protective glasses.
Should I walk around and break doors to people's houses and apartments to train them to make safe doors?
Or should we try instead to make good calm cities and villages where people can live in harmony? And which are policed by the trained faire police?
I think such entities like NSA, the US armed forces shall work on creating the fair co-developed world, work with the United Nations organizations, InterPol to police the Internet worldwide. But not developing attack techniques. Is it a good way to spend limited resources?
Not only this. Forums of RuNet (Russian segment of Internet) are overrun and occupied by the paid bots. They sit tight and at every new original post react with dozens twin posts, which inevitable express the interests of Uncle Sam.
Maybe it is good for interests of the democracy worldwide in perspective, but it surely makes forums uninterstiong and suffocates a free discussion. When State Department announced couple of years back a creation of the Information Special Forces I could not imagine that it will be so massive and omnipresent.
I mean will not Internet die if rich political entities flood it with the political spam? And now this - attacks are being polished again by political forces. Will it grow the same ugly way as the Information Special Forces?
The problem is that a virus can spread very quickly, in a geometrical progression. Like on a code lock there are only 4 digits, but a huge number of variants. Or like nuclear chain reaction.
Think of a room fully packed with charged mousetraps.
Handshakes differ from, say, touching a door handle. Microorganisms are extremely vulnerable to light, air, temperature change; they like when it is wet, dark, and warm. These are the conditions more or less existing on a warm and wet human hand or face.
As soon as viruses or bacterias are exposed to a sun light and a fresh air they began to die or at least get weakened. Some can survive only seconds of such exposure.
We, who saw it in experiments at the microbiological laboratories, should bring this awareness and advice into societal consciousness. It is not about being unfriendly, but about changing a dangerous habit.
There are 6 billions people on Earth now. The handshakes and greeting-hugs like sparks in a room full of a powder. It is the perfect way for viruses to spread in a geometrical progression. What is even more worse is that this European culture of handshakes and greeting-hugs spreads around the world. Indeed, why not using a bow instead?
Why shouldn't a UN General Assembly ban handshakes and greeting-hugs-kisses?
I am trained microbiologist and I know what stupid habits these are. It is not only a flu, it is also a HPV (human papiloma virus), and other infections.
If it is banned by an international law we could stop these epidemics. It can be substituted by a bow, like they do in Japan.
By the way, what other non-contact greetings exist in other cultures?
Politicians will never touch this topic as it may damage their rating. But still the handshakes and hugging-kissing at a meeting are medieval things, which came from the time when epidemics decimated up to 75% of population on a regular basis.
I would not mind if the US unleash the War on Spam. Instead of rockets a sprinkle-bottle with salted water could be used. An agent in black fatigue enters a spammer's apartment with help of satellite watching buddies and sprinkles hi-tec solution into a spammer's machines. After 24 hours or so the machine fails irreparably.
Billions of people around the world in offices, factories, orbit stations, farms, etc. have a break, at least for a while.
What if to construct a raid-flash-drive. Combining 2 flash-drives into one? If one drive is gone, blinking orange lamp goes on, instead of green? Data is written always on 2, like with a raid array.
It is a task for United Nations. Spam is causing a major damage to the world economy via lost work time, traffic, etc. We need international enforceable laws, which would make spam illegal and inevitable punishable worldwide.
It is a bog problem and requires a big solution.
Our leaders shall overcome their cultural shock, phase out activities in local organizations, like EU, NATO, CIS, etc., and begin to work in a global setup, the UN, the WTU - world telecommunication union, Interpol, UNICEF, etc.
What is the point of fighting spam in, say, the USA, if it will continue to pour in from, say, Indonesia?
Do it as a web (intranet) server application in PHP&MySQL. Install WAMP and write it. It will be much easier to maintain. It will be available by the address, say, 192.168.15.10 . So what?
Can you imagine installing a client on a 100 work stations? Upgrading? Been there. Thank you very much.
OK. I agree in general. Still they were going ahead bravely into unknown.
I believe it is not possible to produce an absolutely secure passive system. For example, one can break about any door or wall with a sledgehammer, or one can shoot a man in the best body armor and helmet easily.
What prevents criminals to do it is not only the strength of the door or body armor, but laws, self defense, police, etc., i.e. active hit-back security.
UN is doing about nothing in this direction. Spam brings billions upon billions of losses to the world economy via lost working time. Was anyone punished in Nigeria or wherever this spam is coming? Meanwhile the UN diplomats are doing nothing, while Western leaders are concentrating on very local organization like EU and NATO in the global world and forgetting about UN, which is really global organization.
I bought a hard drive which is connected to my home LAN via network cable. It is actually a device Linux system with Samba server. But in the home LAN it is visible just like a Windows network drive.
It is small and silent as it does not have a fan. It is in an aluminum casing, so it is silent and fast.
500 GB at your fingertips, my wireless LAN is 300 MB/s. There is already 1 GB model.
Why would I need a cloud storage for photos and movies?
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I am thinking of a tower of about 20 - 30 meters (100 feet) from empty plastic bottles. I am trying to use a thin rope to fix bottles together. But I cannot find a solution to make such a tower rigid enough.
I need this tower to make photos of buildings from above. Commercial photo towers are expensive and bulky. But plastic bottles are compact and easily transportable.
I feel that it can be done as these bottles are enough strong and rigid. The question is how to fix them together to make a tower?
It is a modest task in comparison with 20 km tower, but it would be extremely practical open source invention as these bottles are available in abundance. Maybe if we can invent a 30 meters tower, we can then invent 30 kilometer open source tower.
I would suggest to ban by an international law all military robots. While there are not so many of them yet. It would be more difficult and expensive when there are armies of millions military robots.
The definition is simple: no military equipment without a responsible human physically attached to it.
In the 50s it would have been much easier to ban nuclear weapons while there were only few of them around, not hundreds of thousand as it is now.
The robot war machines will be the next generation of weapons of mass destruction.
Soon we will see swarms of poisonous digital mosquitoes, mechanical snakes with nuclear warheads, which can enter the land unnoticed, robot-fish, which enters a lake via a small river and poisons the whole lake, and so on and so forth.
Let us note now how it all started.
For some mountaineers in Eurasia it is already a daily reality. Flying computers attack their village meetings, weddings, etc. killing and wounding dozens in each attack.
As soon as these flying computerized devices are becoming enough numerous hackers will start to pay an attention to them. Because it is nothing but a computer, webcam, mike, wireless modem, hard disk, OS, BIOS, etc.
We may see soon flocks of such volitant robots overtaken by bots or malware taking course on major European and American cities. Rocket attacks by flying robots will become the same daily reality for city dwellers as spam, DDoS attacks, etc.
Bicycle increases a commuting distance from 2.5 km to 17 km. If I had to live in an area where there are nor trams, buses, cars, etc., I would make sure that I owned at least a bicycle.
I guess that these are the secondhand bicycles, which arrive to that parts the same way as old computers arrive to places where people burn plastic in open fires to get some cooper out. Probably no way to count them properly.
These areas are well suited for cycling as there are no rain for months in a row.
I meant "for some millions".
I've met figures that it is bicycle. Mainly due to India, China, Bangladesh, etc.
For how many people cargo is transported by shipping? For some mission of decadents in Europe and North America, that's all. But bicycle is a transporter for billions, for the bulk of humanity.
The largest part of cargo in the world is transported by bicycle, mainly due to the developing countries.
Here are some more ideas:
http://bp0.blogger.com/_ZSRRivY4xlE/SE1hnHCFHEI/AAAAAAAABQI/Q-GBXSLbrZU/s320/funny_bike.jpg
http://bp1.blogger.com/_ZSRRivY4xlE/SE1hm1Wfq_I/AAAAAAAABQA/Z48UPKC_fVc/s320/cartbike.jpg
But real guys make their bicycles themselves:
http://bp3.blogger.com/_ZSRRivY4xlE/R4-pIsc8I3I/AAAAAAAABD8/ZYMBtpEghos/s320/wooden-bike.jpg
When the first steel plows appeared the slave owners went bankrupt. A farmer with a steel plow and other steel tools could produce more and cheaper than a slave owner's enterprise. The demise of slavery still took many centuries. And yet in some parts of the world there are pockets of it even now.
However, the appearance of the steel plow caused abrupt fundamental changes in the bulk of civilization. In fact, it exploded it from within. It cause the appearance of a new philosophy and moral (Christianity). A farmer did not need cruel guards to make work a bunch of slaves with bronze hoes. It also caused absolutely new economical relations.
So, a new, more productive tool, a base, changes not only a facade or some players, the whole thing, the whole deal is changing. We have no way of knowing what it will be, because it will be some smart talented people, who will figure out how to achieve a market victory with these tools.
Until 15th century, until an invention of printing press, books were extremely expensive. One book cost more than several cows. A book was written by hand then, pictures in a book were drawn also by hand.
Printing press made books dirt cheap. But not all was good about it. The first bestselling author was Martin Luther.
Printing press appeared in 1440, the Martin Luther's first bestseller appeared in 1517, 77 years after.
The result was reformation and religious wars. Internet is only about 15 years old. What will happen 77 years after its invention?
But something will happen for sure, as the change in the base does cause changes in the social and economical relations. Sony and the likes' problems are the smallest part of it. The whole thing will change, as the invention is so fundamental. Hopefully there will be no analogs of reformation wars though, which, as I wrote already, were also caused by an invention and its widespread adoption.
Should I walk around and break doors to people's houses and apartments to train them to make safe doors?
Or should we try instead to make good calm cities and villages where people can live in harmony? And which are policed by the trained faire police?
I think such entities like NSA, the US armed forces shall work on creating the fair co-developed world, work with the United Nations organizations, InterPol to police the Internet worldwide. But not developing attack techniques. Is it a good way to spend limited resources?
Maybe it is good for interests of the democracy worldwide in perspective, but it surely makes forums uninterstiong and suffocates a free discussion. When State Department announced couple of years back a creation of the Information Special Forces I could not imagine that it will be so massive and omnipresent.
I mean will not Internet die if rich political entities flood it with the political spam? And now this - attacks are being polished again by political forces. Will it grow the same ugly way as the Information Special Forces?
PHP just works. And works fast.
I think ASPX and JAVA are needed to IT-mafia to impress CEOs who heard somewhere of Microsoft and SUN.
Still recalling a horror of writing in Perl in 90s, I would say PHP is good, more or less.
Think of a room fully packed with charged mousetraps.
As soon as viruses or bacterias are exposed to a sun light and a fresh air they began to die or at least get weakened. Some can survive only seconds of such exposure.
We, who saw it in experiments at the microbiological laboratories, should bring this awareness and advice into societal consciousness. It is not about being unfriendly, but about changing a dangerous habit.
There are 6 billions people on Earth now. The handshakes and greeting-hugs like sparks in a room full of a powder. It is the perfect way for viruses to spread in a geometrical progression. What is even more worse is that this European culture of handshakes and greeting-hugs spreads around the world. Indeed, why not using a bow instead?
I am trained microbiologist and I know what stupid habits these are. It is not only a flu, it is also a HPV (human papiloma virus), and other infections.
If it is banned by an international law we could stop these epidemics. It can be substituted by a bow, like they do in Japan.
By the way, what other non-contact greetings exist in other cultures?
Politicians will never touch this topic as it may damage their rating. But still the handshakes and hugging-kissing at a meeting are medieval things, which came from the time when epidemics decimated up to 75% of population on a regular basis.
:o)
I would not mind if the US unleash the War on Spam. Instead of rockets a sprinkle-bottle with salted water could be used. An agent in black fatigue enters a spammer's apartment with help of satellite watching buddies and sprinkles hi-tec solution into a spammer's machines. After 24 hours or so the machine fails irreparably.
Billions of people around the world in offices, factories, orbit stations, farms, etc. have a break, at least for a while.
What if to construct a raid-flash-drive. Combining 2 flash-drives into one? If one drive is gone, blinking orange lamp goes on, instead of green? Data is written always on 2, like with a raid array.
It is a task for United Nations. Spam is causing a major damage to the world economy via lost work time, traffic, etc. We need international enforceable laws, which would make spam illegal and inevitable punishable worldwide.
It is a bog problem and requires a big solution.
Our leaders shall overcome their cultural shock, phase out activities in local organizations, like EU, NATO, CIS, etc., and begin to work in a global setup, the UN, the WTU - world telecommunication union, Interpol, UNICEF, etc.
What is the point of fighting spam in, say, the USA, if it will continue to pour in from, say, Indonesia?
Do it as a web (intranet) server application in PHP&MySQL. Install WAMP and write it. It will be much easier to maintain. It will be available by the address, say, 192.168.15.10 . So what?
Can you imagine installing a client on a 100 work stations? Upgrading? Been there. Thank you very much.
OK. I agree in general. Still they were going ahead bravely into unknown.
I believe it is not possible to produce an absolutely secure passive system. For example, one can break about any door or wall with a sledgehammer, or one can shoot a man in the best body armor and helmet easily.
What prevents criminals to do it is not only the strength of the door or body armor, but laws, self defense, police, etc., i.e. active hit-back security.
UN is doing about nothing in this direction. Spam brings billions upon billions of losses to the world economy via lost working time. Was anyone punished in Nigeria or wherever this spam is coming? Meanwhile the UN diplomats are doing nothing, while Western leaders are concentrating on very local organization like EU and NATO in the global world and forgetting about UN, which is really global organization.
Good point about physical security. I know a case when both a notebook and backup drive were stolen from an apartment at the same time.
Rather: 1 TB model (in my previous post).
I bought a hard drive which is connected to my home LAN via network cable. It is actually a device Linux system with Samba server. But in the home LAN it is visible just like a Windows network drive.
It is small and silent as it does not have a fan. It is in an aluminum casing, so it is silent and fast.
500 GB at your fingertips, my wireless LAN is 300 MB/s. There is already 1 GB model.
Why would I need a cloud storage for photos and movies?