Leave the ethical questions to the lawyers, our job is to get the technology working.
There are several steps to go before this technology can be truly useful..
Here is what I would do if I were in charge of the program :
Select a number of strong, healthy females.
Clone these females in large quantities (tens of thousands).
These cloned females become the 'mother units' - I would have them all placed into deep comas, rackmounted, and fed on a computer controlled drip feed of nutrients.
You then have a clone factory that can turn out large numbers of a given human genotype in parallel.
This only provides the raw material though - sort of like a hard disk factory that pumps out 20 GB drives at a rate of 100 per hour.
What we need to research is the ability to create clones that retain a pre-programmed memory. This way, we can run off a batch of clones that make up a ship's crew - Commander, Engineer, Navigator, Comms Officer, etc. The crew would have a useful lifespan, for operating the ship whilst the next batch of clones was growing in the tank.
On graduation day, when the next batch of clones matures to age 21, and the generation following them are confirmed to have passed their initial tests, the older redundant crew perform 'The Graduation Ceremony' :
The (older) ships captain delivers a stirring speech thanking the current crew, and welcoming the new crew
The current crew hand over a large silver key, as a symbol of the official handover of responsibility to the new generation of clones
The Younger clones formally salute the older clones as a symbol of their respect and appreciation to the older generation.
To the beat of the drums, and the tune of the bagpipes, the older crew march off towards the airlock, where they are then jettisoned into space.
This effectively solves the very-long-space-flight problem.
Get yourself an old porsche - like a mid 70's 911/911S/911SC - they are cheap these days. You can get a 911 for about the same amount of money that you would save by installing a Linux web server rather than an NT web server. Give it a good polish and attach on a nice bursch exhaust.
It is truly amazing - Every time you stop at the lights EVERY guy in the cars around you is looking at the car, eyes following the curves of the bodywork. EVERY female in the cars around you is looking straight at you. Every gay guy around you cant decide whether to look at you or the car. It wont get you straight into bed with the first girl you see, but at least you wont have to introduce yourself - just park next to her and offer to take her out to lunch. In fact, be so arrogant as to not even telling her your name until she asks 'What, you dont know ME ?...'
I normally walk down the street, and only make eye contact with passing females at a normal (low) rate, but in the 911 you cannot avoid it - you get to choose who flirts with you, rather than take what you can get.
Best to just exchange a cursory glance, and a bored look of 'huh - as if I would be interested in you'. I have even had a Hyundai excel full of teenage girls unbutton their shirts at the traffic lights for my entertainment.
Wear whatever you like, but at least have a good watch. A good watch is something like a Longines, Tag Heuer, Rolex, etc. It is better to wear no watch than to wear something like a Nike watch, or any form of digital watch. Be a geek, but have some class where it counts.
Drive a 911 - get laid whenever you want, by whomever you choose. (Might make a good billboard advert)
----------------------
Guaranteed Guide for Geek Girls :
Get yourself an old porsche - like a mid 70's 911/911S/911SC - they are cheap these days. You can get a 911 for about the same amount of money that you would save by installing a Linux web server rather than an NT web server. Give it a good polish and attach on a nice bursch exhaust.
Feel like sex ? - just wind down the window, pick your man, and point to him. 'You ! get over here.. now'. No man will so no to you.. ever.
Have I missed something, or is this basically it ?
If you have lustful thoughts for someone else - for goodness sakes let her know. Bolster yourself with a drink or 2 if thats what it takes - or better still, try it out on a large sample of complete strangers and get some real stats on the likely feedback.
If someone said 'Do you want to go out on a date' it would sound incredibly odd, but both parties would fully understand exactly what it meant -
Go out together to some place or other, usually with a larger group of people, most of whom 1 of you knows, see a few things, have a laugh or 2, get increasingly drunk as the night goes on, and then retire to someone's house to have sex for as long as possible, usually with the same person that you are 'on a date with'.
I suppose being 'On a date' with someone means that they get first preference when it comes time to have sex, since they were the first to express interest.
Does that definition hold true for Germany / UK as well ?
I think in France, 'Going on a date' simply means 'If I buy you dinner, will you let me go down on you later on ?' - Is this true ?
The reason that most Geeks dont get enough is plainly simple - they have been brainwashed by the 'New Age' movement into thinking that women want someone who is caring and sharing, and willing to get a tattoo of a petunia on their ass to impress their girlfriend.
Not True - Not True at all.
There is 1 single aspect that is at the deepest center of the female mind - an instinct which has been honed to precise perfection. (either by millions of years of evolutionary development, or by the direct genetic manipulation of superior beings - dependant on you POV).
It is not:
Big Biceps
Big Wallet
Sweetness & Kindness
Size of one's dick
Honesty
Intelligence
Pheremone output
Ability to have a conversation
The one thing that drives a woman to select a mate is - Power. Girls reading this will reluctantly agree that this is true, if they are honest about it.
How many women continue to run back into the arms of a total pig of man, who cheats on her, forgets her birthday, insults her mother, etc ? Looking on as men, we cannot understand this, but in a woman's eyes, such men have around them an aura of power that makes the woman always come back 'but I love him' she cries.
What is power and why do women melt at it ? Money is not power, nor are big biceps. Power is about control. You can have a totally rich geek who works out at the Gym 4 nights a week, but whos life is controlled by those around him. He is a yes man, he slinks around with shoulders hunched, and averts his eyes from his 'superiors'. Men cant pick this up, but women see this as weakness - not fit to bear children and provide security for a family. Women outwardly may show more feeling and compassion, but in the deepest heart of a women there is no place for weakness in her partner.
In contrast, you can have someone like al-bundy, useless, flat broke, no feminine side at all - But hey, there is an aura of certainty and security around him. You know that he will always be there for Peggy & the kids, and thats what really counts.
If you want a woman to want you in a more than superficial LJBF way, then dont treat her like your sister, dont treat her like your mother - and dont act like her personal assistant. Act like a bull male lion - approaching a lioness.
You dont bow down to anyone
You dont take orders from anyone
You dont automatically agree with everything anyone else says
People respect you
People listen to you
You know where you are going and what you are doing
You only choose the best of anything - and you only want her because she is above everyone else
By all means make her feel like a Queen, but you had better fill the shoes of a King that she looks up to
Finally, dont fall into the trap of giving her what you want her to give to you... you are both different, and want different things. Love and Cherish her, and She will return Love and Respect.. subtle but important difference there.
Sounds like they need a low-cost version to really get some volume going.
A good way to save money on manufacturing costs would be to toss the harddisk, and add a cheap 10/100 ethernet chipset in its place. Set the thing to bootp of a LAN, and use NFS to mount a remote area and store / retrieve the recordings.
Ditch the phone, and just use a text file on the LAN to get programming info. Save all state information to the NFS drive as well.
Now, if they could produce this and sell it for next to nothing - and make sure that it _cannot_ see SMB drives at all - everyone will have to convert their home networks to Unix/NFS to be able to use it.
You connvince a large number of people that you are doing a great deal of good for the community as a whole, and that any donations from people will be put to good use.
As long as people maintain a level of faith where they believe that a dollar in the church's pocket will have a more far-reaching impact than anything that they personally can acheive, then the money will keep flowing.
This model suits Open Source pure R&D very well.
The challenge is to keep up the faith of the donators, and to maintain a 'value proposition' just like anyone else has to, whilst avoiding the excesses of sloth, greed, lust and idleness in yourself.
In fact, probably the best business book you can read is the Old Testament - its full of a lot of business related parables, and raw common sense, amongst other stuff designed to frighten young children and inspire ufo-ologists.
You connvince a large number of people that you are doing a great deal of good for the community as a whole, and that any donations from people will be put to good use.
As long as people maintain a level of faith where they believe that a dollar in the church's pocket will have a more far-reaching impact than anything that they personally can acheive, then the money will keep flowing.
This model suits Open Source pure R&D very well.
The challenge is to keep up the faith of the donators, and to maintain a 'value proposition' just like anyone else has to, whilst avoiding the excesses of sloth, greed, lust and idleness in yourself.
In fact, probably the best business book you can read is the Old Testament - its full of a lot of business related parables, and raw common sense, amongst other stuff designed to frighten young children and inspire ufo-ologists.
There are only 2 ways of making money in OpenSource, and horizontal software is not one of them.
Gnome, Gnumeric, Office, etc are all well and good, but they are way too horizontal.
In the future, nobody will pay for horizontal software.
The 3 main ways of making money in the future (in this software industry) are :
Traditional flogging of vertical market packages. Make something really neat, like a turn-key system to run a medical front office, or a complete hardware+software solution to control a cruise missile. You need a team of people available to take phone calls 24x7, onsite training, flash office, glossy brochures, regular advertising, etc. All very traditional business sense here, nothing new except that your product uses Linux/Gnome. You need a good management team and plenty of cash to roll this idea off. The idea and the technology itself become almost irrelevant to the success of the venture - it needs to be good, sure, but that is not even half the story.
Consulting. Hang out your sign, sign on with a few headhunters, and sell your time. You still work for the man, so to speak, but the money is better, and the risks are zero. Needs no money to startup.
Online service. Buy a bomb-proof bunker, build a beowulf box, connect in a clump of T1's and provide some essential service on the net. Hire some 24x7 nightowls and a security guard. Build your business model on something simple but essential, pump up the volumes, and skim off a toekn management fee on each transaction.
These are the principle means of making a living in the industry. In fact, these basic tennants apply to any industry, in any age since the dawn of civilisation.
Just tread carefully, get out of bed early and do the ugly hard stuff, and make sure that each day you make more than you spend, and you should be fine.
Yes, I am from Oz, and yes, I have done some work in this area.
I have been on the site where this work is done, and all I can say is - Panic Not. There is an awful lot of traffic to be monitored, so the focus of the equipment is very narrow. Even with all of the gear that they have got, they still only get to monitor a very small portion of the stuff that is really interesting.
If you want to go look at the gear - it is just out of Alice Springs, on the road to Ayers Rock. The most intersting thing about the whole site is the Yanks - the Australian facilities are fairly unassuming looking affairs, but this base (Pine Gap) has lots of Yanks in camo fatigues and sunglasses toting guns, and driving around in left hand drive cars on the wrong side of the road.
The other reason not to panic (about echelon) is that around the same area (within a days drive), there are some much much more interesting things.
For example, in a certain area, you can drive off the road for some distance, right in the middle of fscking no-where and you will find a series of trapdoors in the bare dirt. Open them up , and climb down the ladder into a small cylindrical bunker about 2 meters across and 4 meters deep. The bunker is full of thick wires coming out of the ground and going to... who knows where ? Right in the middle of this bunker is a little 68000 based computer chugging away quietly doing data aquisition. It is completely sureal being in this bunker, with nothing but hundreds of miles of dead silent red soil bush around you.
Also, about another days drive in the same area, is an even more amazing site... absolutely nothing for miles, and then this thing hidden behind a hill with an array of massive diesel engines chugging away. Nearby is a big metal grid on the ground near what appears to be antennas - walk over this at the wrong time of day and watch the hairs stand up on your head (like a Van Der Graph generator). Extremely cool.. but I cannot tell you what it is for:)
The elite Pz Divisions for the big iron, such as Liebstandarte, Das Reich and Totenkopf.
Then there are a number of second line Pz Divisions, as well as several Panzer Grenadier Division for support boxes.
Then there are a number of specialist units such as 12th SS Pz Div Hitler Jugend - the young and reckless box (test environment).
Lastly there are a number of foreign legion divisions such as Galacia, Wiking, etc, etc.
The wonderous thing about this scheme is that each Division has a unique number (which all computer staff have to be familiar with of course), which you can use for unique number in the IP address scheme !!!
Once this has been done, you can then name development projects after towns in Russia and re-live Barbarossa all over again...
For weekly meetings, make sure that your development staff all attend in period costume, each divisional 'General' in turn can snap to attention, deliver their report in short and sharp tones, and then click their heels loudly...
You should see the look of total puzzlement on management's faces when you conclude your weekly activity reports with - 'Ve have trapped Die Bolschevisten in the Kharkov pocket and 3rd SS Pz Das Reich vill smash them by the end of ze veek... Sieg Heil !!!'
You can of course change the subject matter if not being completely PC is more to your liking.. In another company that I know of, the IT manager turned up to the board meeting dressed as Cortez, (complete with conquistador helmet) with his retinue dressed as Catholic priests and inquisitors..
When concluding his report, he pounded his fist onto the table and declared that 'By months end, the Toltec empire will be ours, and by the Grace of God, the gold of the Mayan temples would be sailing forwith for Spain ! - Long Live His Majesty !'
Transmeta are building a rifle - but not any old rifle.
This one is super accurate - say, accurate enough to fire it from California, and hit someone in the head in, say, Redmond Seattle.
The barrel is 4 yards long, calibre.303 inches. It has taken 4 years to build so far because the barrel and rifling need to be 100% perfect for this level of accuracy. This requires 4 years of hand finished rifling grooves.
Once a round has been fired, the barrel then has to be discarded, as the wear from a single bullet will be enough to alter the accuracy.
The first (and only) round is due to be fired at midnight on New Years Eve, and all being well, will successfully blow billy's brains out.
The Cops in Seattle will be able to determine the direction that the shot came from, but no-one will be able to guess just how _far_ the bullet travelled.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several steps to go before this technology can be truly useful
Here is what I would do if I were in charge of the program :
This only provides the raw material though - sort of like a hard disk factory that pumps out 20 GB drives at a rate of 100 per hour.
What we need to research is the ability to create clones that retain a pre-programmed memory. This way, we can run off a batch of clones that make up a ship's crew - Commander, Engineer, Navigator, Comms Officer, etc. The crew would have a useful lifespan, for operating the ship whilst the next batch of clones was growing in the tank.
On graduation day, when the next batch of clones matures to age 21, and the generation following them are confirmed to have passed their initial tests, the older redundant crew perform 'The Graduation Ceremony' :
This effectively solves the very-long-space-flight problem.
Advice for Geek Guys with a bit of cash :
...'
.. now'. No man will so no to you .. ever.
Get yourself an old porsche - like a mid 70's 911/911S/911SC - they are cheap these days. You can get a 911 for about the same amount of money that you would save by installing a Linux web server rather than an NT web server. Give it a good polish and attach on a nice bursch exhaust.
It is truly amazing - Every time you stop at the lights EVERY guy in the cars around you is looking at the car, eyes following the curves of the bodywork. EVERY female in the cars around you is looking straight at you. Every gay guy around you cant decide whether to look at you or the car. It wont get you straight into bed with the first girl you see, but at least you wont have to introduce yourself - just park next to her and offer to take her out to lunch. In fact, be so arrogant as to not even telling her your name until she asks 'What, you dont know ME ?
I normally walk down the street, and only make eye contact with passing females at a normal (low) rate, but in the 911 you cannot avoid it - you get to choose who flirts with you, rather than take what you can get.
Best to just exchange a cursory glance, and a bored look of 'huh - as if I would be interested in you'. I have even had a Hyundai excel full of teenage girls unbutton their shirts at the traffic lights for my entertainment.
Wear whatever you like, but at least have a good watch. A good watch is something like a Longines, Tag Heuer, Rolex, etc. It is better to wear no watch than to wear something like a Nike watch, or any form of digital watch. Be a geek, but have some class where it counts.
Drive a 911 - get laid whenever you want, by whomever you choose. (Might make a good billboard advert)
----------------------
Guaranteed Guide for Geek Girls :
Get yourself an old porsche - like a mid 70's 911/911S/911SC - they are cheap these days. You can get a 911 for about the same amount of money that you would save by installing a Linux web server rather than an NT web server. Give it a good polish and attach on a nice bursch exhaust.
Feel like sex ? - just wind down the window, pick your man, and point to him. 'You ! get over here
Protocol :
Have I missed something, or is this basically it ?
If you have lustful thoughts for someone else - for goodness sakes let her know. Bolster yourself with a drink or 2 if thats what it takes - or better still, try it out on a large sample of complete strangers and get some real stats on the likely feedback.
If someone said 'Do you want to go out on a date' it would sound incredibly odd, but both parties would fully understand exactly what it meant -
Go out together to some place or other, usually with a larger group of people, most of whom 1 of you knows, see a few things, have a laugh or 2, get increasingly drunk as the night goes on, and then retire to someone's house to have sex for as long as possible, usually with the same person that you are 'on a date with'.
I suppose being 'On a date' with someone means that they get first preference when it comes time to have sex, since they were the first to express interest.
Does that definition hold true for Germany / UK as well ?
I think in France, 'Going on a date' simply means 'If I buy you dinner, will you let me go down on you later on ?' - Is this true ?
Not True - Not True at all.
There is 1 single aspect that is at the deepest center of the female mind - an instinct which has been honed to precise perfection. (either by millions of years of evolutionary development, or by the direct genetic manipulation of superior beings - dependant on you POV).
It is not :
The one thing that drives a woman to select a mate is - Power. Girls reading this will reluctantly agree that this is true, if they are honest about it.
How many women continue to run back into the arms of a total pig of man, who cheats on her, forgets her birthday, insults her mother, etc ? Looking on as men, we cannot understand this, but in a woman's eyes, such men have around them an aura of power that makes the woman always come back 'but I love him' she cries.
What is power and why do women melt at it ? Money is not power, nor are big biceps. Power is about control. You can have a totally rich geek who works out at the Gym 4 nights a week, but whos life is controlled by those around him. He is a yes man, he slinks around with shoulders hunched, and averts his eyes from his 'superiors'. Men cant pick this up, but women see this as weakness - not fit to bear children and provide security for a family. Women outwardly may show more feeling and compassion, but in the deepest heart of a women there is no place for weakness in her partner.
In contrast, you can have someone like al-bundy, useless, flat broke, no feminine side at all - But hey, there is an aura of certainty and security around him. You know that he will always be there for Peggy & the kids, and thats what really counts.
If you want a woman to want you in a more than superficial LJBF way, then dont treat her like your sister, dont treat her like your mother - and dont act like her personal assistant. Act like a bull male lion - approaching a lioness.
Finally, dont fall into the trap of giving her what you want her to give to you ... you are both different, and want different things. Love and Cherish her, and She will return Love and Respect .. subtle but important difference there.
Sounds like they need a low-cost version to really get some volume going.
A good way to save money on manufacturing costs would be to toss the harddisk, and add a cheap 10/100 ethernet chipset in its place. Set the thing to bootp of a LAN, and use NFS to mount a remote area and store / retrieve the recordings.
Ditch the phone, and just use a text file on the LAN to get programming info. Save all state information to the NFS drive as well.
Now, if they could produce this and sell it for next to nothing - and make sure that it _cannot_ see SMB drives at all - everyone will have to convert their home networks to Unix/NFS to be able to use it.
You connvince a large number of people that you are doing a great deal of good for the community as a whole, and that any donations from people will be put to good use.
As long as people maintain a level of faith where they believe that a dollar in the church's pocket will have a more far-reaching impact than anything that they personally can acheive, then the money will keep flowing.
This model suits Open Source pure R&D very well.
The challenge is to keep up the faith of the donators, and to maintain a 'value proposition' just like anyone else has to, whilst avoiding the excesses of sloth, greed, lust and idleness in yourself.
In fact, probably the best business book you can read is the Old Testament - its full of a lot of business related parables, and raw common sense, amongst other stuff designed to frighten young children and inspire ufo-ologists.
You connvince a large number of people that you are doing a great deal of good for the community as a whole, and that any donations from people will be put to good use.
As long as people maintain a level of faith where they believe that a dollar in the church's pocket will have a more far-reaching impact than anything that they personally can acheive, then the money will keep flowing.
This model suits Open Source pure R&D very well.
The challenge is to keep up the faith of the donators, and to maintain a 'value proposition' just like anyone else has to, whilst avoiding the excesses of sloth, greed, lust and idleness in yourself.
In fact, probably the best business book you can read is the Old Testament - its full of a lot of business related parables, and raw common sense, amongst other stuff designed to frighten young children and inspire ufo-ologists.
Gnome, Gnumeric, Office, etc are all well and good, but they are way too horizontal.
In the future, nobody will pay for horizontal software.
The 3 main ways of making money in the future (in this software industry) are :
These are the principle means of making a living in the industry. In fact, these basic tennants apply to any industry, in any age since the dawn of civilisation.
Just tread carefully, get out of bed early and do the ugly hard stuff, and make sure that each day you make more than you spend, and you should be fine.
I have been on the site where this work is done, and all I can say is - Panic Not. There is an awful lot of traffic to be monitored, so the focus of the equipment is very narrow. Even with all of the gear that they have got, they still only get to monitor a very small portion of the stuff that is really interesting.
If you want to go look at the gear - it is just out of Alice Springs, on the road to Ayers Rock. The most intersting thing about the whole site is the Yanks - the Australian facilities are fairly unassuming looking affairs, but this base (Pine Gap) has lots of Yanks in camo fatigues and sunglasses toting guns, and driving around in left hand drive cars on the wrong side of the road.
The other reason not to panic (about echelon) is that around the same area (within a days drive), there are some much much more interesting things.
For example, in a certain area, you can drive off the road for some distance, right in the middle of fscking no-where and you will find a series of trapdoors in the bare dirt. Open them up , and climb down the ladder into a small cylindrical bunker about 2 meters across and 4 meters deep. The bunker is full of thick wires coming out of the ground and going to ... who knows where ? Right in the middle of this bunker is a little 68000 based computer chugging away quietly doing data aquisition. It is completely sureal being in this bunker, with nothing but hundreds of miles of dead silent red soil bush around you.
Also, about another days drive in the same area, is an even more amazing site ... absolutely nothing for miles, and then this thing hidden behind a hill with an array of massive diesel engines chugging away. Nearby is a big metal grid on the ground near what appears to be antennas - walk over this at the wrong time of day and watch the hairs stand up on your head (like a Van Der Graph generator). Extremely cool .. but I cannot tell you what it is for :)
The elite Pz Divisions for the big iron, such as Liebstandarte, Das Reich and Totenkopf.
Then there are a number of second line Pz Divisions, as well as several Panzer Grenadier Division for support boxes.
Then there are a number of specialist units such as 12th SS Pz Div Hitler Jugend - the young and reckless box (test environment).
Lastly there are a number of foreign legion divisions such as Galacia, Wiking, etc, etc.
The wonderous thing about this scheme is that each Division has a unique number (which all computer staff have to be familiar with of course), which you can use for unique number in the IP address scheme !!!
Once this has been done, you can then name development projects after towns in Russia and re-live Barbarossa all over again ...
For weekly meetings, make sure that your development staff all attend in period costume, each divisional 'General' in turn can snap to attention, deliver their report in short and sharp tones, and then click their heels loudly ...
You should see the look of total puzzlement on management's faces when you conclude your weekly activity reports with - 'Ve have trapped Die Bolschevisten in the Kharkov pocket and 3rd SS Pz Das Reich vill smash them by the end of ze veek ... Sieg Heil !!!'
You can of course change the subject matter if not being completely PC is more to your liking .. In another company that I know of, the IT manager turned up to the board meeting dressed as Cortez, (complete with conquistador helmet) with his retinue dressed as Catholic priests and inquisitors ..
When concluding his report, he pounded his fist onto the table and declared that 'By months end, the Toltec empire will be ours, and by the Grace of God, the gold of the Mayan temples would be sailing forwith for Spain ! - Long Live His Majesty !'
This one is super accurate - say, accurate enough to fire it from California, and hit someone in the head in, say, Redmond Seattle.
The barrel is 4 yards long, calibre .303 inches. It has taken 4 years to build so far because the barrel and rifling need to be 100% perfect for this level of accuracy. This requires 4 years of hand finished rifling grooves.
Once a round has been fired, the barrel then has to be discarded, as the wear from a single bullet will be enough to alter the accuracy.
The first (and only) round is due to be fired at midnight on New Years Eve, and all being well, will successfully blow billy's brains out.
The Cops in Seattle will be able to determine the direction that the shot came from, but no-one will be able to guess just how _far_ the bullet travelled.
SteveOC