Do these cards help out 3D raytracing/rendering programs like POVRAY, or do they just provide the "quick and dirty" raytrace/render operations & don't provide any additional functionality for those raytrace/renderers?
Once the Gnutella protocol is published, it should be possible to build a bridge to the Napster namespace - this would facilitate the expansion of both dataspaces really quickly!
I've had the fortunate opportunity to experience some really effective subways in London, Japan (Tokyo area), Paris & Washington, DC.
The things I really liked about them, and which I consider necessary for any system which will be used & cost-effective:
1. They go everywhere. I could get to anywhere in those cities by walking a couple of blocks, with one or two transfers in between.
2. They were cheap (a buck or two at the most), and got cheaper the more I used them (volume discount/passes).
3. They were convenient. I could walk into any subway entrance & get tickets in any amount to any destination with either cash, ATM or credit card, within a minute or two.
4. They were frequent - in Tokyo, I never had to wait more than 2 minutes for any train. They arrived on time, to the second.
5. They all ran on raised platforms so that they were completely independent of the local traffic patterns, which really sucked in most of the high-density urban environments. I contrast this experience to the light rail stations running here in Portland, Oregon, which have to go through the stop lights just like all the other cars.
6. They had many overlapping local/express routes - so you could take the express routes to get quickly into the area you wanted to go, then switch to a local route to get dumped practically on the doorstop of your final destination.
The BIG problem that I saw, is that without the incredibly high population densities in these particular urban environments, NO ONE is going to be able to build self-sustaining mass transit.
These systems work because of a critical mass of people who are using them on a regular basis, paying good money & who need them available to survive.
As long as the people in the Mid & Western United States prefer a low-population density lifestyle, they will never be able to build an effective mass transit system which can compete with all of the above benefits of a mass transit system w/o massive subsidization (which will inevitably appear to most taxpayers as an incredible waste of taxpayer money).
I think all money transactions should be in dimes. They're really cool looking, and the sheer logistics of earning & spending large amounts of them will reduce class differences (and make it less cost-effective for robbers & embezzlers).
I'm unsure as to how this relates to the thread, so I'm going to assume by this you mean you wish to abolish wiretapping in favor of prosecution and imprisonment. If this isn't what you mean, by all means clarify.
I read it to mean that people who illegally violate the privacy of innocents should be put into prison. Of course, this doesn't help if violating the privacy of innocents is not illegal...
How do you propose to convict and imprison people if you limit (or remove altogether) law enforcement's per-case court approved intelligence gathering abilities?
Why do we have to leave it up to "law enforcement" to gather intelligence? This just separates the individuals involved in "law enforcement" from the society they are supposed to be protecting, making it more likely that they will put their own interests above that of the general population.
Ideally, the general population should be able to perform its own "intelligence" operations on things that affect itself, and only request help from its "law enforcement" specialists when all else has failed.
I don't see this situation in most of today's cities - the law enforcement has become quite isolated from the population they are supposed to be protecting. (I think that programs like community policing are supposed to help with this isolation, but it's really hard to reverse a societal trend.)
That's why we need to build the IJB functionality directly into the browser, and make cookies, banners & java/javascript an "opt-in" feature, and on a site-by-site basis instead of either all-on or all-off.
I would also like to see any references to descriptions of what kinds of optical elements you need to use in what setups to create real optical logic circuits (not convert-to-electrical-and-back type of logic).
I want the IJB _BUILT_IN_ to my browser! Filters for cookies, URLS & javascript/java (and all the other stuff that your browser does "automatically") - all set up so you have to OPT IN, to prevent other sites from using your own browser against you "under the covers".
It's really annoying to have to keep turning on & off features of the browser for particular sites & URLs.
I've occasionally "died" in my dreams (got shot, crushed, drowned, whatever), but I usually end up in some weird modernistic Dantesque version of an afterlife (often more interesting than "real life"!), so apparently my brain isn't taking that death seriously...
That's the point! General purpose operating systems NEED that kind of functionality. The more connected everybody becomes, the greater the need.
Instead of spending effort on promoting an "alternative platform" like JVMs which won't stop anybody who operates outside of that platform, those resources would be much better spent _implementing_ the "proper" operating system support.
Right, like you're going to force a malicious hacker to only write code which will run in a JVM? Don't be ridiculous - they're just going to write an ActiveX control or whatever & crack a clueless user's machine like a walnut...
To save most "clueless user"s from most of these attacks, the platform needs to support an virtual machine "jail" BY DEFAULT, and no matter WHAT is executing (including buggy JVMs!) - and make it more difficult for people who don't understand what's going on to allow these processes to escape the jail.
To do all that, with any hope of a "bulletproof" solution, you need support from the operating system. Trying to make every one use a "verifiably-safe platform" is a ridiculous solution.
If you really want to try and fit it into a "verifiably-safe" platform paradigm, then just think of the operating system-provided jail as "lazy" safe-platform verification - you get the indication that the code is not safe WHEN the code tries to escape the jail...
I'm hoping eventually to see palmtops with just a connector for some virtual-reality glasses. Then, you can have as complex a desktop as your electronics can support in a portable package, and without constraining the actual computing module by the shape of the output device.
Of course, the proper input device for such a beasty is probably still under debate. If you have a complicated desktop possible, then one of those handheld cording keyboards would probably be more efficient than a stylus arrangement.
No, that limits the sandbox/virtual machine to a single language - you need operating system support so that people can use whatever tool they want (and be as lousy/malicious programmers as they want) and it won't compromise the security.
It seems like it has become necessary for the operating system to protect the user from malicious net code - just about everything downloaded from the net should be automatically locked into an operating system-supported "virtual machine" where all resources are released when the user shuts down that connection.
Applications which want to be persistent on a user's machine will have to ask for permission, and if they further want access to certain system resources, they will have to ask the user for permission to hook into those resources (and which resources they are hooking into) - all protected by the operating system.
Of course, this will not protect naive users from social engineering, but the _default_ behavior will be of protection rather than being wide open - and in the case of multi-user systems, then the administrator will be able to control how much access each user will allow the outside net to access system resources.
I'm sure there's at least a few engineers on the net who would be willing to donate some effort to designing equipment. And, using the usual "industrial engineering" viewpoint, you don't necessarily build the final product directly - you can design machines to build the product, or design the machines to build the machines to build the product, etc.
As far as investors are concerned, I've been seeing regular stories about people willing to donate money to legal defense funds, public relations efforts, the EFF, etc. If you can make a convincing case that you will be able to make hardware free of "establishment" constraints (and that you just aren't trying to steal people's money), you could probably get a lot of people to seed such an effort.
I think you'd still need a few full-time people to make sure everything was running smoothly.
Re: charter
The charter would be very important - making sure that the goal of the organization is to produce hardware for the community, at cost. You could probably just throw up the accounting books on the web so that anybody could audit the books at anytime.
By creating solid products which just perform their basic function & "ignore" all of the crap which the big consumer-electronics firms put in to try & control how people use their products, such an alternative might be very appealing to a lot of people.
I mentioned this in a previous thread, but it was at the tail-end of the discussion so I guess nobody read it.
Basically, we're at the mercy of these large companies because they control all of the manufacturing facilities necessary to create the tools that we use to create & view all this content. As long as they cooperate with each other, they can force anything they want down our throats because we don't have the ability to create hardware which ignores their restrictions.
If they keep pushing this, then the only way we will have tools which behave the way WE want them to, is to figure out a way to build them ourselves.
I'm not sure why people have to STOP using the trademarked symbol/logo? Isn't it okay if they just document the fact that the symbol/logo is trademarked by so-and-so corporation/individual?
That's why I was wondering whether it would be feasible to use the donations that everybody seems to be so eager to offer as seed money, and take advantage of the free labor from those people who can't give donations, to create a company or non-profit organization whose charter is to CREATE those difficult-to-produce hardware ideas & sell them at cost (so that once the organization was rolling, it would fund itself aside from the startup costs).
As part of the goals of the charter, would be to establish defacto open hardware (and related software) standards free of intellectual encumbrances from companies whose sole purpose is profit.
The FSF is limited by its name - Free _Software_ Foundation. I was talking about a company/organization which could actually produce HARDWARE implementations which directly challenge the hold that large consumer electronics giants have over the consuming marketplace - like unencrypted DVD players, telephones with strong encryption built in, etc.
Instead of concentrating funds to try and influence EXISTING companies, how about concentrating funds to build NEW companies or organizations (perhaps nonprofit?) which are specifically chartered to develop alternatives to the technologies which we dislike?
For instance, would it be possible to create a foundation which would design, manufacturer & sell at cost, players & disks using DVD-technology (or flourescence, whatever the latest stuff is) but unencrypted?
How much would it cost to set up something like this, esp. if they would also accept & organize the efforts of "free" labor from interested people all over the world?
Basically, my thought is that a lot of these big companies can dictate terms to the marketplace because they're the only ones which have the hardware/manufacturing facilities. We've got a lot of brainpower on the net, who have shown that they love tough problems, but there's no way to turn all that brainpower into real "products".
Might it be more cost effective to focus our donations (kind of like a voluntary "tax") into an organization which would organize the resources necessary to make our "desired" products a reality? If it was explicitly non-profit (only charged at-cost for its products), was seeded/subsidized by regular donations from activism, and took proper advantage of the brainpower of people willing to contribute, I'm sure that foundations like that could become a potent economic force!
You won't magically make the layer-selection problem go away here. Previous layers will still fluoresce as your UV beam shines through them - just not as brightly. However, they will fluoresce over a larger area, conserving total luminosity.
Perhaps each flourescent layer will only respond to a laser of a particular frequency, or (now that I read the article a little more closely), it looks like they might be able to make each layer flouresce at a difference frequency, so they can use that to pick out which layer they are exciting.
SO what about the 2nd part of my comment, about doing a "black-hole list"-type setup where many people through the net cooperate with each other to portscan the whole net, identify open systems, then help those systems to become secure or cooperatively block them if they won't?
How 'bout if the GOVERNMENT goes around port-scanning the machines in the net for exploitable holes, and then requires that those people take their machines off the net until they've got the holes fixed up?
(I know, I know, it would piss off a lot of people, who would complain about government interference - it would be an odd sort of backlash though: "The government wouldn't let me keep my system insecure!")
Maybe you could do something like the RBL system, where you have people cooperatively portscanning the net, reporting machines that they find "open", then trying to get the owners to fix them up (providing advice where necessary), but RBLing them if they don't cooperate?
Slashdot Mirror
Do these cards help out 3D raytracing/rendering programs like POVRAY, or do they just provide the "quick and dirty" raytrace/render operations & don't provide any additional functionality for those raytrace/renderers?
Once the Gnutella protocol is published, it should be possible to build a bridge to the Napster namespace - this would facilitate the expansion of both dataspaces really quickly!
I suspect that many network administrators will resort to limiting the data rates per student (or host), for ALL protocols to some small level.
:)
There's nothing that the students can really do about that except pay more for more bandwidth.
So, in the end, each student will probably be back to a 9.6kb line
I've had the fortunate opportunity to experience some really effective subways in London, Japan (Tokyo area), Paris & Washington, DC.
The things I really liked about them, and which I consider necessary for any system which will be used & cost-effective:
1. They go everywhere. I could get to anywhere in those cities by walking a couple of blocks, with one or two transfers in between.
2. They were cheap (a buck or two at the most), and got cheaper the more I used them (volume discount/passes).
3. They were convenient. I could walk into any subway entrance & get tickets in any amount to any destination with either cash, ATM or credit card, within a minute or two.
4. They were frequent - in Tokyo, I never had to wait more than 2 minutes for any train. They arrived on time, to the second.
5. They all ran on raised platforms so that they were completely independent of the local traffic patterns, which really sucked in most of the high-density urban environments. I contrast this experience to the light rail stations running here in Portland, Oregon, which have to go through the stop lights just like all the other cars.
6. They had many overlapping local/express routes - so you could take the express routes to get quickly into the area you wanted to go, then switch to a local route to get dumped practically on the doorstop of your final destination.
The BIG problem that I saw, is that without the incredibly high population densities in these particular urban environments, NO ONE is going to be able to build self-sustaining mass transit.
These systems work because of a critical mass of people who are using them on a regular basis, paying good money & who need them available to survive.
As long as the people in the Mid & Western United States prefer a low-population density lifestyle, they will never be able to build an effective mass transit system which can compete with all of the above benefits of a mass transit system w/o massive subsidization (which will inevitably appear to most taxpayers as an incredible waste of taxpayer money).
I think all money transactions should be in dimes. They're really cool looking, and the sheer logistics of earning & spending large amounts of them will reduce class differences (and make it less cost-effective for robbers & embezzlers).
I read it to mean that people who illegally violate the privacy of innocents should be put into prison. Of course, this doesn't help if violating the privacy of innocents is not illegal...
Why do we have to leave it up to "law enforcement" to gather intelligence? This just separates the individuals involved in "law enforcement" from the society they are supposed to be protecting, making it more likely that they will put their own interests above that of the general population.
Ideally, the general population should be able to perform its own "intelligence" operations on things that affect itself, and only request help from its "law enforcement" specialists when all else has failed.
I don't see this situation in most of today's cities - the law enforcement has become quite isolated from the population they are supposed to be protecting. (I think that programs like community policing are supposed to help with this isolation, but it's really hard to reverse a societal trend.)
That's why we need to build the IJB functionality directly into the browser, and make cookies, banners & java/javascript an "opt-in" feature, and on a site-by-site basis instead of either all-on or all-off.
I would also like to see any references to descriptions of what kinds of optical elements you need to use in what setups to create real optical logic circuits (not convert-to-electrical-and-back type of logic).
I want the IJB _BUILT_IN_ to my browser! Filters for cookies, URLS & javascript/java (and all the other stuff that your browser does "automatically") - all set up so you have to OPT IN, to prevent other sites from using your own browser against you "under the covers".
It's really annoying to have to keep turning on & off features of the browser for particular sites & URLs.
I've occasionally "died" in my dreams (got shot, crushed, drowned, whatever), but I usually end up in some weird modernistic Dantesque version of an afterlife (often more interesting than "real life"!), so apparently my brain isn't taking that death seriously...
That's the point! General purpose operating systems NEED that kind of functionality. The more connected everybody becomes, the greater the need.
Instead of spending effort on promoting an "alternative platform" like JVMs which won't stop anybody who operates outside of that platform, those resources would be much better spent _implementing_ the "proper" operating system support.
Right, like you're going to force a malicious hacker to only write code which will run in a JVM? Don't be ridiculous - they're just going to write an ActiveX control or whatever & crack a clueless user's machine like a walnut...
To save most "clueless user"s from most of these attacks, the platform needs to support an virtual machine "jail" BY DEFAULT, and no matter WHAT is executing (including buggy JVMs!) - and make it more difficult for people who don't understand what's going on to allow these processes to escape the jail.
To do all that, with any hope of a "bulletproof" solution, you need support from the operating system. Trying to make every one use a "verifiably-safe platform" is a ridiculous solution.
If you really want to try and fit it into a "verifiably-safe" platform paradigm, then just think of the operating system-provided jail as "lazy" safe-platform verification - you get the indication that the code is not safe WHEN the code tries to escape the jail...
I'm hoping eventually to see palmtops with just a connector for some virtual-reality glasses. Then, you can have as complex a desktop as your electronics can support in a portable package, and without constraining the actual computing module by the shape of the output device.
Of course, the proper input device for such a beasty is probably still under debate. If you have a complicated desktop possible, then one of those handheld cording keyboards would probably be more efficient than a stylus arrangement.
No, that limits the sandbox/virtual machine to a single language - you need operating system support so that people can use whatever tool they want (and be as lousy/malicious programmers as they want) and it won't compromise the security.
It seems like it has become necessary for the operating system to protect the user from malicious net code - just about everything downloaded from the net should be automatically locked into an operating system-supported "virtual machine" where all resources are released when the user shuts down that connection.
Applications which want to be persistent on a user's machine will have to ask for permission, and if they further want access to certain system resources, they will have to ask the user for permission to hook into those resources (and which resources they are hooking into) - all protected by the operating system.
Of course, this will not protect naive users from social engineering, but the _default_ behavior will be of protection rather than being wide open - and in the case of multi-user systems, then the administrator will be able to control how much access each user will allow the outside net to access system resources.
Can somebody either describe to me or point me to a description of how you would use these little magnetic elements to create logic elements?
That's along the lines I was thinking of.
Re: the initial startup cost
I'm sure there's at least a few engineers on the net who would be willing to donate some effort to designing equipment. And, using the usual "industrial engineering" viewpoint, you don't necessarily build the final product directly - you can design machines to build the product, or design the machines to build the machines to build the product, etc.
As far as investors are concerned, I've been seeing regular stories about people willing to donate money to legal defense funds, public relations efforts, the EFF, etc. If you can make a convincing case that you will be able to make hardware free of "establishment" constraints (and that you just aren't trying to steal people's money), you could probably get a lot of people to seed such an effort.
I think you'd still need a few full-time people to make sure everything was running smoothly.
Re: charter
The charter would be very important - making sure that the goal of the organization is to produce hardware for the community, at cost. You could probably just throw up the accounting books on the web so that anybody could audit the books at anytime.
By creating solid products which just perform their basic function & "ignore" all of the crap which the big consumer-electronics firms put in to try & control how people use their products, such an alternative might be very appealing to a lot of people.
I mentioned this in a previous thread, but it was at the tail-end of the discussion so I guess nobody read it.
Basically, we're at the mercy of these large companies because they control all of the manufacturing facilities necessary to create the tools that we use to create & view all this content. As long as they cooperate with each other, they can force anything they want down our throats because we don't have the ability to create hardware which ignores their restrictions.
If they keep pushing this, then the only way we will have tools which behave the way WE want them to, is to figure out a way to build them ourselves.
I'm not sure why people have to STOP using the trademarked symbol/logo? Isn't it okay if they just document the fact that the symbol/logo is trademarked by so-and-so corporation/individual?
That's why I was wondering whether it would be feasible to use the donations that everybody seems to be so eager to offer as seed money, and take advantage of the free labor from those people who can't give donations, to create a company or non-profit organization whose charter is to CREATE those difficult-to-produce hardware ideas & sell them at cost (so that once the organization was rolling, it would fund itself aside from the startup costs).
As part of the goals of the charter, would be to establish defacto open hardware (and related software) standards free of intellectual encumbrances from companies whose sole purpose is profit.
The FSF is limited by its name - Free _Software_ Foundation. I was talking about a company/organization which could actually produce HARDWARE implementations which directly challenge the hold that large consumer electronics giants have over the consuming marketplace - like unencrypted DVD players, telephones with strong encryption built in, etc.
Instead of concentrating funds to try and influence EXISTING companies, how about concentrating funds to build NEW companies or organizations (perhaps nonprofit?) which are specifically chartered to develop alternatives to the technologies which we dislike?
For instance, would it be possible to create a foundation which would design, manufacturer & sell at cost, players & disks using DVD-technology (or flourescence, whatever the latest stuff is) but unencrypted?
How much would it cost to set up something like this, esp. if they would also accept & organize the efforts of "free" labor from interested people all over the world?
Basically, my thought is that a lot of these big companies can dictate terms to the marketplace because they're the only ones which have the hardware/manufacturing facilities. We've got a lot of brainpower on the net, who have shown that they love tough problems, but there's no way to turn all that brainpower into real "products".
Might it be more cost effective to focus our donations (kind of like a voluntary "tax") into an organization which would organize the resources necessary to make our "desired" products a reality? If it was explicitly non-profit (only charged at-cost for its products), was seeded/subsidized by regular donations from activism, and took proper advantage of the brainpower of people willing to contribute, I'm sure that foundations like that could become a potent economic force!
Perhaps each flourescent layer will only respond to a laser of a particular frequency, or (now that I read the article a little more closely), it looks like they might be able to make each layer flouresce at a difference frequency, so they can use that to pick out which layer they are exciting.
SO what about the 2nd part of my comment, about doing a "black-hole list"-type setup where many people through the net cooperate with each other to portscan the whole net, identify open systems, then help those systems to become secure or cooperatively block them if they won't?
How 'bout if the GOVERNMENT goes around port-scanning the machines in the net for exploitable holes, and then requires that those people take their machines off the net until they've got the holes fixed up?
(I know, I know, it would piss off a lot of people, who would complain about government interference - it would be an odd sort of backlash though: "The government wouldn't let me keep my system insecure!")
Maybe you could do something like the RBL system, where you have people cooperatively portscanning the net, reporting machines that they find "open", then trying to get the owners to fix them up (providing advice where necessary), but RBLing them if they don't cooperate?