I was referring to re-entry at the speeds necessary for a kinetic weapon to do the kind of damage referred to. An orbiting satellite and a kinetic bomb would have very different initial trajectories.
Wouldn't accuracy be an even bigger problem for things dropped from space? And the Iridium satellites would have pieces survive, sure, but the uncontrolled atmospheric burning would introduce a great deal of unpredictability as to their final destination. Same for kinetic-drop weapons. I'm sure the technology could deal with it, I'm just wondering how something like this would be a better weapon than a Tomahawk missile flying nap-of-the-earth for 200 miles.
What would be the terminal velocity of a "properly shaped piece of steel", and how high of a drop would you need to reach it (assuming your target is at sea level)?
But God already knew what I was going to do. Heck, before I was even born, he already knew. Since he created the universe, he knew exactly the outcome of all events that would ever happen. Including whether or not any given person would accept Christ. If God created the universe, then everything that happened, happened because he wanted it to -- it cannot be the case that he created the universe to *see what would happen*, because before he even created it, he knew what would happen!
Also, since God created me, and presumably gave me the intellect and upbringing and influences that I have, why isn't it his fault if I don't accept Christ? Everything God apparently gave me tells me that religion is bunk and that God doesn't exist. And yet I burn in hell for this? God is not only all-knowing, he's a jerk, too!
Now I'm not saying that we shouldn't hold people responsible for their actions -- as *far as we can tell* we do have free will, and it's reasonable to continue acting as such. From a purely philosophical standpoint, however, if the Christian God exists, then there isn't any such thing as free will. The position and velocity of every particle at every point in time from Creation to the End, would be because God willed it.
Well, in order for a kinetic object to be moving fast enough to do the same amount of damage to a tank that a conventional explosive would do, it would have to be moving fairly fast. Faster than the speed of sound, for one thing, which means you get nice big shockwaves propagating all over the place, and if your goal is precision destruction, then huge shockwaves bouncing around doesn't seem like a desired side-effect.
Even if such an object were falling at 1200 ft/sec (which is faster than sound last I checked), though it would do considerable damage to something it hit, there's still the matter of guidance. Hitting a tank moving at 60 miles per hour with an object moving at 1200 ft/sec is not going to be particularly easy. Heck, at that speed, course corrections would be insanely difficult, especially should the tank turn at the last second. Any significant changes in direction to the projectile (and thus aspect of its cross-section) would cause a huge slowdown from friction. Now you've got the object falling at maybe 300-400 feet per second, which is still going to hurt -- if it manages to hit -- but not any more than a TOW missile fired from 500 feet away by a sniper.
If this is such a great idea, how come it's never been used before? Surely one of these heavy low-cross section thingies could be dropped from a plane at 30,000 feet and would reach the same terminal velocity as one dropped from orbit by the time it hit the ground. Yet no one has ever done this. Why?
Why would you be against Bad Religion? They're a great band, much more original than... oh.
My favorite thing about Christianity is that if God is all-knowing, then he already knows everything that's going to happen, including whether or not I'm going to accept Christ or not. And since God apparently created me, it's his fault if I don't.
700,000 feet is 132 miles, which is just beyond the Earth's atmosphere. If you dropped a 300 pound warhead (explosive or not), it would either burn up on reentry, or if it didn't, friction would slow it down so that by the time it landed, it would be falling at a couple hundred feet per second. Last time I checked, objects falling at a couple hundred feet per second do very little damage to anything but themselves. (Like skydivers before they open their parachute, for example.) The only way to have kinetic damage from an object falling from space be significant is to have it travelling multiple miles per second *when it enters the atmosphere*. Depending on the size of the object, it will disintegrate and explode at a given altitude. A 200-300 pound man-made metal object is likely to be a few feet across, and moving at 1 mile per second would disintegrate within a few seconds upon hitting the *top* level of the atmosphere, to say nothing of reaching the ground. The object would have to be at least the size of a bus and moving at least 7 miles per second in order to even make it to the earth's surface.
My numbers may be off a little but this should be generally accurate. Kinetic weapons from space are way harder to use and implement than regular self-guided conventional (or nuclear) weapons, and to a lesser (and much less controllable) effect. Unless you have a body with no atmosphere, in which case something like this would only work insofar as destroying whatever it hit directly -- remember, shock waves don't propagate without a medium. Drop a nuke on the moon, and all of the damage done would be thermal and radiation damage (which is 80-90% of the released energy anyway, but still); the kinetic energy released by the explosion would carry the bomb material itself outward at a high velocity, but there would be a tiny quantity of that material. In atmosphere, the overpressure shockwave caused by a nuke can do massive damage as well, but it needs the atmosphere to propagate the kinetic energy.
...I thought it said, "Amazon Starts 'Jar Jar' System". I was about to have a heart attack... I mean just imagine, that idiot Gungan keeping track of your purchases...
Einstein also thought that quantum mechanics was bogus. Doesn't mean he's right. Anyway, what Einstein said was that HE never memorized anything he could look up, not that everyone should never memorize anything they could look up.
...this sort of relates to the idea I (and many others before me) have had for a while. The world is still operating as if there isn't enough for everybody, so we still have to compete. Regardless of what the resource is -- food, electricity, land, heck, even information -- we keep acting as if there's only a limited supply, so we better not share!
Two examples spring to mind. One is that, for the past 30-35 years, the U.S.A. has had the capacity to produce enough food to feed every person on Earth, thanks to technological advances. Even though our population has nearly doubled in that time, we *STILL* can produce 30 times as much food as we need.
And yet we don't. Why? Because who's gonna pay for the shipping and distribution to other countries? If the top 1% of the wealthiest people in the country each contributed half of their money/resources to this and other problems, we could have an entire world with a solid communications, travel, and most importantly, EDUCATIONAL infrastructure. THE ENTIRE WORLD. But, no, the rich would never do that; it's their money and they earned it, and screw everyone else.
The second example are these giant housing tracts out on the edges of urban areas (like the deserts surrounding Los Angeles), that were built with the expectation of filling up with emigrants from the cities, but instead failed. Thousands of homes stand empty. And yet we still have homeless people. Why? Because they can't pay for it. What if we gave them the housing, and tried to help them become productive members of society? Train them, teach them, help them. No, we can't do that, it would cost too much money.
It just makes me sad. I honestly look forward to the day someone invents a general assembler, that can not only replicate food and water (and building materials) from raw materials like dirt and rocks, but can also replicate *itself*. Maybe it's a pipe dream, but I don't think so. Give nano 20 years and we'll see what happens.
Actually, I'm more sure now that it was about ten years ago. I remember it was the same year as Desert Storm.:)
Also, it wasn't Kyoto University, it was definitely in the USA. In fact I think it was Stanford University. I distinctly remember a picture of a white guy (i.e. NOT a Japanese guy) above the story with an American name holding a little plastic cube. Shrug. He could have been a white guy at Kyoto University I suppose:)
I found two other stories on Slashdot from the past year about holographic storage. Spiffy a technology as it sounds, it would be really nice if someone would just freakin' come to market with a product already.
I remember reading about, hmm, it must have been almost ten years ago now, in the New York Times, and article about holographic storage under development at some university. They had prototypes that could do some huge amount of data (probably a gig or something, at the time that would have been huge) in a polymer cube one centimeter on a side.
It would be SO nice if this would stop being a pipe dream and become reality. Disk access is by far the thing that slows me down the most when computing. Superfast, super-high density permanent storage keeps sounding almost too good to be true...
I haven't used it lately, by the way; but I did use it a bunch last year, mostly in the first half of 2000.
I have never used Napster to download an entire album, except in one case (detailed later). All of my Napster usage was to find individual songs that I wanted, but was not about to pay the cost of an entire CD for. The problem is that I want one song, but I can't just buy one song at the store (singles CDs are as overpriced as album CDs). Given no real alternative, and yet still desiring the song, I used Napster. Probably got about forty or fifty songs, but no entire albums.
The only time I downloaded an entire album was when I wanted to find a particular song off the Swingers soundtrack. It's a song with almost no lyrics (at least, the lyrics are only at the end, and hard to make out), so I couldn't just do a text search to figure out what it was. So I downloaded the entire Swingers soundtrack, and listened to it one by one until I found the song: "Pick up the Pieces" by Average White Band.
Then I deleted the rest of the album.
The final irony: My mom bought me the Swingers soundtrack CD for Christmas this past year.:)
I guess my position is, as long as I can't get the music I want (which is to say, individual songs that are normally only available as part of an overpriced single or album), I'm going to go download them.
I did buy 20-30 regular CDs last year, as well. When I want an entire album, I buy it. When I want one song, I WOULD buy it, if it were available. Sucks to be the big labels; if they'd had a system available whereby I could have downloaded, for 50-99 cents a pop, MP3s of those 40-50 songs I got from Napster, I would easily have done that instead of wasting time trying to find good connections on Napster! The fools!
Well, I've modified my window manager (IceWM) to include a list of all the open windows when using alt-tab instead of just one, and a handful of the GNU command-line programs in one way or another. I'm also working on adding keyboard hotkey support to licq.
The point isn't that *I* necessarily need to be able to modify the source, the point is that if the source is open, *anyone can fix a bug and submit a patch*. No more waiting 6 months for Microsoft to release a service patch that MAY OR MAY NOT include your bug fix.
Granted they are SLOWLY getting better about this, but if you're using NT 4 now, you're fucked, because MS is not releasing any more patches for NT 4, so if something's broken, it's going to be broken forever.
Just because *you* don't have the time to worry about any of the code in your underlying programs (OS, window manager, etc.) doesn't mean that it's not a good thing it's available!
Yeah, it's a good thing Windows 2000 is also available free of charge, and that if there's something I don't like about it, I have the source code to W2K so I can change whatever I want!
Justify anything to deprive someone of payment for their work? I guess that explains the more than $2,000 I spent last year on entertainment. Going to the movies and the theater. Buying books. Buying music. (Not DVDs, however.)
The point isn't that I want to steal media. I, and most other people here (not you though) are aware that if someone is doing something to make money, and they don't make money, they will eventually stop doing it. IT IS NOT TO MY BENEFIT TO DEPRIVE THE CONTENT CREATORS OF PAYMENT FOR THEIR WORK.
Sure, some people don't realize this, and it would be nice to educate them. I feel perfectly fine with paying for most media, most of the time.
But when the big media companies decide that in order to squeeze every conceivable penny out of the people that they can, by buying laws that restrict our freedoms and conspiring to introduce hardware that restricts our abilities to do WHAT WE PLEASE with THINGS WE PAID FOR, THEN I get upset and angry.
You would have us all lie down and do whatever the media companies say, because you believe they have some God- or law-given right to make money!
And we *HAVE ALREADY MADE OUR OWN MEDIA FORMATS* you troll! Vorbis! DivX (the video codec one, not the stupid Circuit City scheme)! It's not about making new media formats, it's about these companies trying to VIOLATE OUR LEGAL RIGHTS. Because of the media companies, Minidiscs are fairly useless, when they could have been an awesomely cool technology. Because of the media companies, it's possible to legally buy a DVD, and legally buy a DVD player, and they won't work, not because they're incompatible, BUT BECAUSE SOFTWARE IN THE PLAYER SPECIFICALLY PREVENTS YOU FROM PLAYING DVDs BOUGHT IN OTHER REGIONS!
Perhaps you could bother to educate me on why, exactly, there's no difference between me stealing a Chrysler, and me copying a CD (yet leaving the original CD with its original owner, undamaged and intact). You keep acting like it's a foregone conclusion, yet you refuse to provide any reasoning why (people who say, "If you don't know, I'm not going to deign to tell you" are just being assholes by refusing to shed any light on something they know is indefensible. Usually. Why don't you prove me wrong?).
The bit about copying data being some old thief's excuse? What the hell is that? If I steal a Chrysler, that's a Chrysler the owner no longer possesses. If I make a copy of a song, the original owner still has the song. They have lost nothing. You've made no argument; you've simply stated, de facto, that this argument is wrong, without stating why.
Furthermore, it's people like you who make what the content providers do socially acceptable. "You shouldn't be copying! You're just doing it nefariously to your own ends!" Napster's a bad example because of the way it's constructed: you can't really use it to do anything but search for songs or artists you already know exist. But what the content providers are trying to do is PREVENT ANYONE FROM GETTING A PIECE OF THEIR PIE. They want it to be their exclusive right to create and control popular media; they want to make it impossible for people to do what the Internet and cheap hardware have made it possible to do: create and distribute alternative media.
Sure, I can go create a CD, like you said. But I can't create a DVD. Why not? Because the content providers don't want me to be able to.
It's not about little people "stealing" from the big media companies; it's about the big media companies trying to control everything so they can make a little more money. And it fucking blows.
Use too much water and electricity, and the cops will assume you're running a hydroponics lab.
Why would the police in Los Angeles be going over my utilities bill stored on computers in Virginia?
As for your VIN - someone joked that they might not want their insurance company knowing they'd just purchased some bondo and paint. I agree - 'cuz I just read the [H]ardOCP article on case-modding, and have a free weekend coming up...;-)
Um... I don't get it. I don't even know what "bondo" is.
A better example - would you want your insurance company or a potential employer knowing you were purchasing over-the-counter "supplements" ( never mind the issue of the questionable efficacy of herbals) that people often use to treat medical conditions?
If I were dumb enough to buy something like that with a credit card instead of cash...
What happens when a data miner notices your purchase of St. John's Wort (that you ran down to the store to get for your bedridden grandmother who believes in the stuff) coinciding with your purchase of a gun ('cuz you happened to take up target shooting last week) and some industrial music (for your skr1pt k1dd13 nephew's Christmas present) and comes to the obvious - yet incorrect - conclusion.
See above re stupidity of paying with a credit card for things like drugs and guns.
Unless you want to live in a universe in which the data miners know everything about everyone (so that their software can come to the correct conclusion in cases like the one I outlined), the best response is to deny access to the data unless there's a need-to-know. What you see as the most trivial piece of information could be the one your adversary's looking for.
Ah, but this is the crux of the matter. Such data gathering about people SHOULD BE ILLEGAL. Well, not the gathering itself, per se -- but the selling of it. Why? Because it does nothing but degrade the quality of life.
This really just occurred to me, full-formed (I mean yeah, it's kind of obvious, but still). I don't have some kind of personal moral objection to people knowing things about me -- it's the potential for abuse that I would mind. Thanks for helping me realize that:) The upshot is, that kind of stuff should be illegal to sell without explicit written consent from the person involved.
The marketing organizations do not have your best interests at heart. They have demonstrated a voracious appetite for your data. The logical response is to deny them what they want.
This is true, and I agree. However I am comfortable with the fact that paymybills.com has a policy stating they will not sell any of that info. Perhaps they won't follow it; well, I suppose I could live in fear, but that's no fun.
If it's the Cold War and you're a CIA agent, and a cute Russian babe walks up to you and asks you "Amerikanski, I theenk my cheep Russian watch is two minutes slow, and I have to get to the train, what time do you have on your fine Amerikan timepiece?", you don't answer.
If I'm a CIA field operative? I'm certainly not going to be stupid enough to give anyone an accurate reading off my watch.
Maybe it was just a gal who wanted to know if she'd catch her train. Or maybe she wants to know where to wait for after you synchronize watches with your junior agent who's mission involves walking around town and "bumping into" his contact under a bridge at precisely midnight.
Yeah, and maybe you're not with the CIA, and shouldn't make up bizarre situations that have little to do with demographic data collection.:)
...and leave the internet to those of us who don't mind using dotted quads.:) I'm only half-kidding.
Here's an idea. How about we remove top-level domains entirely? Why not have a system where instead of browsing to "http://www.slashdot.org", I just go to "http://slashdot"? One obvious problem is what do you do about all the situations where there's x.com, x.org. x.net, etc. Well, the answer is, they all stay as they are, but we stop using TLDs for all new domains. So you could be just slashdot.
This means that your web browser would go to the A.root servers for the old TLDs, and instead of having a top-level server for each TLD, we'd have one for each letter of the alphabet (or whatever other characters in whatever other languages can start words, so that the language you're using is irrelevant and it isn't US-centric). Then we have a big ole distributed system of servers, each one of which serves a particular letter (or even group of letters, I dunno how fast those big-ass servers are).
So you've got a box that serves 'A' and 'B', one that serves 'C' and 'D', etc. That way, TLDs are a thing of the past.
The biggest problem of course is, who decides who gets which domains. And what about domain speculators (or people who are just rich jerks) who buy up hundreds or thousands of domain names?
How about a system where any given entity can only register one name per day? And it would cost something small, or maybe it would just be free.
Obviously this has a lot of work to go into it, but it certainly would be an improvement. Hierarchy is nice, but is it necessary? You could still of course register a name like "cia.usgovt" if the "usgovt" name wasn't already taken.
http://www.paymybills.com/securityandprivacy.htm l
I personally am in a sort of meta-confusion state about the whole "respect my privacy!" thing that some Slashdotters (and other privacy advocates) go on about. I don't care what anyone knows about me if they aren't going to use it for a nefarious purpose. Oh no! Someone knows how much electricity I use. Oh no! Someone knows who I call on my telephone.
I don't consider sending junk mail to be nefarious, nor do I have a problem with targeted advertising -- I'd much rather see ads for things I'm interested in, instead of things I'm not. (Wouldn't you? Of course, I'd rather not see ads *at all* but given as it's not much of an option...) When junk mail comes, I chuck it. Sometimes I contact the mailer if I can, and order them to remove me from their mailing list. I usually back this up with lots of threats of lawsuits and criminal proceedings, and they're happy to comply after that...
What's the company going to do with my VIN exactly? I'm confused on that one. And water and electricity... what is it exactly that they are going to *do* with all this information?
Incidentally, I almost never use my land line for making phone calls; I average ONE long-distance call per month. I use my cellphone for everything else, but the phone numbers I call are not listed on my cell phone bill. I can change this if I want, but I haven't wanted to yet. But even if they did have all this info, WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO WITH IT?!
Please note that I am NOT saying that they are not going to do anything with it, NOR am I saying that there isn't anything they could do with it. I really, honestly, WANT TO KNOW what it is they [could/are going to] do with it that would be so terrible as to warrant the hassle of paying my bills by hand...
This is only true mostly because people aren't aware of electronic alternatives. I personally use a site called paymybills.com. Basically I told all my billers to send the bills to their address in Virginia; I get email whenever a new bill arrives. paymybills scans the bill in, enters all the appropriate data (due date, minimum payment, total bill balance), and I can pay my bills (har har) with a couple clicks of the mouse. It's awesome. It's not free, something like $8 bucks a month, but that's easily worth the reduction in hassle and effort I used to put into mailing paper bills.
Wells Fargo, my bank, also has their own version of this accessible through their website, but I was using pmb before I was aware of that, and it's not really worth the effort to change (and it's not free, either, it's still something like $5 a month with WF -- yeah I could save $3 a month, but whatever).
PMB also lets you, at the end of each year, buy (for something like $20) a CD containing your entire bill archives for the year. Spiffy. Naturally there's all sorts of other features I've not mentioned (automatic payment, ability to set up recurring payments for things like rent where you don't get sent a bill, etc.).
Anyone with a computer can put the days of paper behind them.
"It's not a conspiracy to prevent piracy, it's just the laser! The laser doesn't pick up CD-R's well, it's just the way it works!"
Did it ever occur to you people that maybe when DVD was being developed, there might have been a conversation that went like this:
Engineer: "Well, this 60nm blue laser we're using works great, EXCEPT it won't read CD-Rs."
Executive: "CD-R? What's that? Is that like a CD?"
Engineer: "Well yeah, it's a recordable CD, so people can write their own CDs. You know, they can backup data, make custom music CDs, whatever."
Executive: "Oh really."
(Later.)
Executive: "Well the engineer said they COULD use another type of laser, or a dual-laser doohickey, so it could read CD-Rs, but, ah, you know how [Hollywood | the music division of our humongous multinational greed-driven conglomerate | the lawyers] is/are about recordable media..."
Executive 2: "Good point. Let's stick with the single blue laser. No copying for you! Muahahaha!"
Executive: "Muahahaha!"
Okay, it probably wasn't that nefarious, but did it ever occur to you that they chose that type of laser PARTIALLY BECAUSE IT CAN'T READ CD-Rs WELL?
Note that I am not claiming that this is what happened, but I find it nearly amazing that no one here even bothered to entertain the possibility.
...who saw that the White House link went to a directory called "hot_releases" and immediately formed a mental image of something called "Washington's Wildest Interns"?
Slashdot Mirror
I was referring to re-entry at the speeds necessary for a kinetic weapon to do the kind of damage referred to. An orbiting satellite and a kinetic bomb would have very different initial trajectories.
Wouldn't accuracy be an even bigger problem for things dropped from space? And the Iridium satellites would have pieces survive, sure, but the uncontrolled atmospheric burning would introduce a great deal of unpredictability as to their final destination. Same for kinetic-drop weapons. I'm sure the technology could deal with it, I'm just wondering how something like this would be a better weapon than a Tomahawk missile flying nap-of-the-earth for 200 miles.
What would be the terminal velocity of a "properly shaped piece of steel", and how high of a drop would you need to reach it (assuming your target is at sea level)?
But God already knew what I was going to do. Heck, before I was even born, he already knew. Since he created the universe, he knew exactly the outcome of all events that would ever happen. Including whether or not any given person would accept Christ. If God created the universe, then everything that happened, happened because he wanted it to -- it cannot be the case that he created the universe to *see what would happen*, because before he even created it, he knew what would happen!
Also, since God created me, and presumably gave me the intellect and upbringing and influences that I have, why isn't it his fault if I don't accept Christ? Everything God apparently gave me tells me that religion is bunk and that God doesn't exist. And yet I burn in hell for this? God is not only all-knowing, he's a jerk, too!
Now I'm not saying that we shouldn't hold people responsible for their actions -- as *far as we can tell* we do have free will, and it's reasonable to continue acting as such. From a purely philosophical standpoint, however, if the Christian God exists, then there isn't any such thing as free will. The position and velocity of every particle at every point in time from Creation to the End, would be because God willed it.
Well, in order for a kinetic object to be moving fast enough to do the same amount of damage to a tank that a conventional explosive would do, it would have to be moving fairly fast. Faster than the speed of sound, for one thing, which means you get nice big shockwaves propagating all over the place, and if your goal is precision destruction, then huge shockwaves bouncing around doesn't seem like a desired side-effect.
Even if such an object were falling at 1200 ft/sec (which is faster than sound last I checked), though it would do considerable damage to something it hit, there's still the matter of guidance. Hitting a tank moving at 60 miles per hour with an object moving at 1200 ft/sec is not going to be particularly easy. Heck, at that speed, course corrections would be insanely difficult, especially should the tank turn at the last second. Any significant changes in direction to the projectile (and thus aspect of its cross-section) would cause a huge slowdown from friction. Now you've got the object falling at maybe 300-400 feet per second, which is still going to hurt -- if it manages to hit -- but not any more than a TOW missile fired from 500 feet away by a sniper.
If this is such a great idea, how come it's never been used before? Surely one of these heavy low-cross section thingies could be dropped from a plane at 30,000 feet and would reach the same terminal velocity as one dropped from orbit by the time it hit the ground. Yet no one has ever done this. Why?
My favorite thing about Christianity is that if God is all-knowing, then he already knows everything that's going to happen, including whether or not I'm going to accept Christ or not. And since God apparently created me, it's his fault if I don't.
My numbers may be off a little but this should be generally accurate. Kinetic weapons from space are way harder to use and implement than regular self-guided conventional (or nuclear) weapons, and to a lesser (and much less controllable) effect. Unless you have a body with no atmosphere, in which case something like this would only work insofar as destroying whatever it hit directly -- remember, shock waves don't propagate without a medium. Drop a nuke on the moon, and all of the damage done would be thermal and radiation damage (which is 80-90% of the released energy anyway, but still); the kinetic energy released by the explosion would carry the bomb material itself outward at a high velocity, but there would be a tiny quantity of that material. In atmosphere, the overpressure shockwave caused by a nuke can do massive damage as well, but it needs the atmosphere to propagate the kinetic energy.
...I thought it said, "Amazon Starts 'Jar Jar' System". I was about to have a heart attack... I mean just imagine, that idiot Gungan keeping track of your purchases...
...the Windows-loving jackass in the next cubicle keeps stealing my memory! Last week I had 256 MB, now I only have 64.
Einstein also thought that quantum mechanics was bogus. Doesn't mean he's right. Anyway, what Einstein said was that HE never memorized anything he could look up, not that everyone should never memorize anything they could look up.
...this sort of relates to the idea I (and many others before me) have had for a while. The world is still operating as if there isn't enough for everybody, so we still have to compete. Regardless of what the resource is -- food, electricity, land, heck, even information -- we keep acting as if there's only a limited supply, so we better not share!
Two examples spring to mind. One is that, for the past 30-35 years, the U.S.A. has had the capacity to produce enough food to feed every person on Earth, thanks to technological advances. Even though our population has nearly doubled in that time, we *STILL* can produce 30 times as much food as we need.
And yet we don't. Why? Because who's gonna pay for the shipping and distribution to other countries? If the top 1% of the wealthiest people in the country each contributed half of their money/resources to this and other problems, we could have an entire world with a solid communications, travel, and most importantly, EDUCATIONAL infrastructure. THE ENTIRE WORLD. But, no, the rich would never do that; it's their money and they earned it, and screw everyone else.
The second example are these giant housing tracts out on the edges of urban areas (like the deserts surrounding Los Angeles), that were built with the expectation of filling up with emigrants from the cities, but instead failed. Thousands of homes stand empty. And yet we still have homeless people. Why? Because they can't pay for it. What if we gave them the housing, and tried to help them become productive members of society? Train them, teach them, help them. No, we can't do that, it would cost too much money.
It just makes me sad. I honestly look forward to the day someone invents a general assembler, that can not only replicate food and water (and building materials) from raw materials like dirt and rocks, but can also replicate *itself*. Maybe it's a pipe dream, but I don't think so. Give nano 20 years and we'll see what happens.
SuperFUD!
Actually, I'm more sure now that it was about ten years ago. I remember it was the same year as Desert Storm. :)
:)
Also, it wasn't Kyoto University, it was definitely in the USA. In fact I think it was Stanford University. I distinctly remember a picture of a white guy (i.e. NOT a Japanese guy) above the story with an American name holding a little plastic cube. Shrug. He could have been a white guy at Kyoto University I suppose
I found two other stories on Slashdot from the past year about holographic storage. Spiffy a technology as it sounds, it would be really nice if someone would just freakin' come to market with a product already.
I remember reading about, hmm, it must have been almost ten years ago now, in the New York Times, and article about holographic storage under development at some university. They had prototypes that could do some huge amount of data (probably a gig or something, at the time that would have been huge) in a polymer cube one centimeter on a side.
It would be SO nice if this would stop being a pipe dream and become reality. Disk access is by far the thing that slows me down the most when computing. Superfast, super-high density permanent storage keeps sounding almost too good to be true...
I haven't used it lately, by the way; but I did use it a bunch last year, mostly in the first half of 2000.
:)
I have never used Napster to download an entire album, except in one case (detailed later). All of my Napster usage was to find individual songs that I wanted, but was not about to pay the cost of an entire CD for. The problem is that I want one song, but I can't just buy one song at the store (singles CDs are as overpriced as album CDs). Given no real alternative, and yet still desiring the song, I used Napster. Probably got about forty or fifty songs, but no entire albums.
The only time I downloaded an entire album was when I wanted to find a particular song off the Swingers soundtrack. It's a song with almost no lyrics (at least, the lyrics are only at the end, and hard to make out), so I couldn't just do a text search to figure out what it was. So I downloaded the entire Swingers soundtrack, and listened to it one by one until I found the song: "Pick up the Pieces" by Average White Band.
Then I deleted the rest of the album.
The final irony: My mom bought me the Swingers soundtrack CD for Christmas this past year.
I guess my position is, as long as I can't get the music I want (which is to say, individual songs that are normally only available as part of an overpriced single or album), I'm going to go download them.
I did buy 20-30 regular CDs last year, as well. When I want an entire album, I buy it. When I want one song, I WOULD buy it, if it were available. Sucks to be the big labels; if they'd had a system available whereby I could have downloaded, for 50-99 cents a pop, MP3s of those 40-50 songs I got from Napster, I would easily have done that instead of wasting time trying to find good connections on Napster! The fools!
Well, I've modified my window manager (IceWM) to include a list of all the open windows when using alt-tab instead of just one, and a handful of the GNU command-line programs in one way or another. I'm also working on adding keyboard hotkey support to licq.
The point isn't that *I* necessarily need to be able to modify the source, the point is that if the source is open, *anyone can fix a bug and submit a patch*. No more waiting 6 months for Microsoft to release a service patch that MAY OR MAY NOT include your bug fix.
Granted they are SLOWLY getting better about this, but if you're using NT 4 now, you're fucked, because MS is not releasing any more patches for NT 4, so if something's broken, it's going to be broken forever.
Just because *you* don't have the time to worry about any of the code in your underlying programs (OS, window manager, etc.) doesn't mean that it's not a good thing it's available!
Akira sucks! It's just overblown because it's so popular, it's not really that great!
Akira was a milestone! Excellent animation, an intriguing, deep story, and more!
Why would you see this for free? You can download it for free on the net!
Because, you dumbass, seeing a movie on a GIGANTIC SCREEN is somewhat more impressive than seeing it on a tiny computer monitor!
Movies suck!
They're making a live-action version of Akira, with Natalie Portman and Leonardo DiCaprio as the blue midget psychic children!
*phew* Glad I saved us all that effort.
Yeah, it's a good thing Windows 2000 is also available free of charge, and that if there's something I don't like about it, I have the source code to W2K so I can change whatever I want!
Hey, wait a minute...
Justify anything to deprive someone of payment for their work? I guess that explains the more than $2,000 I spent last year on entertainment. Going to the movies and the theater. Buying books. Buying music. (Not DVDs, however.)
The point isn't that I want to steal media. I, and most other people here (not you though) are aware that if someone is doing something to make money, and they don't make money, they will eventually stop doing it. IT IS NOT TO MY BENEFIT TO DEPRIVE THE CONTENT CREATORS OF PAYMENT FOR THEIR WORK.
Sure, some people don't realize this, and it would be nice to educate them. I feel perfectly fine with paying for most media, most of the time.
But when the big media companies decide that in order to squeeze every conceivable penny out of the people that they can, by buying laws that restrict our freedoms and conspiring to introduce hardware that restricts our abilities to do WHAT WE PLEASE with THINGS WE PAID FOR, THEN I get upset and angry.
You would have us all lie down and do whatever the media companies say, because you believe they have some God- or law-given right to make money!
And we *HAVE ALREADY MADE OUR OWN MEDIA FORMATS* you troll! Vorbis! DivX (the video codec one, not the stupid Circuit City scheme)! It's not about making new media formats, it's about these companies trying to VIOLATE OUR LEGAL RIGHTS. Because of the media companies, Minidiscs are fairly useless, when they could have been an awesomely cool technology. Because of the media companies, it's possible to legally buy a DVD, and legally buy a DVD player, and they won't work, not because they're incompatible, BUT BECAUSE SOFTWARE IN THE PLAYER SPECIFICALLY PREVENTS YOU FROM PLAYING DVDs BOUGHT IN OTHER REGIONS!
Perhaps you could bother to educate me on why, exactly, there's no difference between me stealing a Chrysler, and me copying a CD (yet leaving the original CD with its original owner, undamaged and intact). You keep acting like it's a foregone conclusion, yet you refuse to provide any reasoning why (people who say, "If you don't know, I'm not going to deign to tell you" are just being assholes by refusing to shed any light on something they know is indefensible. Usually. Why don't you prove me wrong?).
Wow, you're full of shit.
The bit about copying data being some old thief's excuse? What the hell is that? If I steal a Chrysler, that's a Chrysler the owner no longer possesses. If I make a copy of a song, the original owner still has the song. They have lost nothing. You've made no argument; you've simply stated, de facto, that this argument is wrong, without stating why.
Furthermore, it's people like you who make what the content providers do socially acceptable. "You shouldn't be copying! You're just doing it nefariously to your own ends!" Napster's a bad example because of the way it's constructed: you can't really use it to do anything but search for songs or artists you already know exist. But what the content providers are trying to do is PREVENT ANYONE FROM GETTING A PIECE OF THEIR PIE. They want it to be their exclusive right to create and control popular media; they want to make it impossible for people to do what the Internet and cheap hardware have made it possible to do: create and distribute alternative media.
Sure, I can go create a CD, like you said. But I can't create a DVD. Why not? Because the content providers don't want me to be able to.
It's not about little people "stealing" from the big media companies; it's about the big media companies trying to control everything so they can make a little more money. And it fucking blows.
Why would the police in Los Angeles be going over my utilities bill stored on computers in Virginia?
As for your VIN - someone joked that they might not want their insurance company knowing they'd just purchased some bondo and paint. I agree - 'cuz I just read the [H]ardOCP article on case-modding, and have a free weekend coming up... ;-)
Um... I don't get it. I don't even know what "bondo" is.
A better example - would you want your insurance company or a potential employer knowing you were purchasing over-the-counter "supplements" ( never mind the issue of the questionable efficacy of herbals) that people often use to treat medical conditions?
If I were dumb enough to buy something like that with a credit card instead of cash...
What happens when a data miner notices your purchase of St. John's Wort (that you ran down to the store to get for your bedridden grandmother who believes in the stuff) coinciding with your purchase of a gun ('cuz you happened to take up target shooting last week) and some industrial music (for your skr1pt k1dd13 nephew's Christmas present) and comes to the obvious - yet incorrect - conclusion.
See above re stupidity of paying with a credit card for things like drugs and guns.
Unless you want to live in a universe in which the data miners know everything about everyone (so that their software can come to the correct conclusion in cases like the one I outlined), the best response is to deny access to the data unless there's a need-to-know. What you see as the most trivial piece of information could be the one your adversary's looking for.
Ah, but this is the crux of the matter. Such data gathering about people SHOULD BE ILLEGAL. Well, not the gathering itself, per se -- but the selling of it. Why? Because it does nothing but degrade the quality of life.
This really just occurred to me, full-formed (I mean yeah, it's kind of obvious, but still). I don't have some kind of personal moral objection to people knowing things about me -- it's the potential for abuse that I would mind. Thanks for helping me realize that :) The upshot is, that kind of stuff should be illegal to sell without explicit written consent from the person involved.
The marketing organizations do not have your best interests at heart. They have demonstrated a voracious appetite for your data. The logical response is to deny them what they want.
This is true, and I agree. However I am comfortable with the fact that paymybills.com has a policy stating they will not sell any of that info. Perhaps they won't follow it; well, I suppose I could live in fear, but that's no fun.
If it's the Cold War and you're a CIA agent, and a cute Russian babe walks up to you and asks you "Amerikanski, I theenk my cheep Russian watch is two minutes slow, and I have to get to the train, what time do you have on your fine Amerikan timepiece?", you don't answer.
If I'm a CIA field operative? I'm certainly not going to be stupid enough to give anyone an accurate reading off my watch.
Maybe it was just a gal who wanted to know if she'd catch her train. Or maybe she wants to know where to wait for after you synchronize watches with your junior agent who's mission involves walking around town and "bumping into" his contact under a bridge at precisely midnight.
Yeah, and maybe you're not with the CIA, and shouldn't make up bizarre situations that have little to do with demographic data collection. :)
...and leave the internet to those of us who don't mind using dotted quads. :) I'm only half-kidding.
Here's an idea. How about we remove top-level domains entirely? Why not have a system where instead of browsing to "http://www.slashdot.org", I just go to "http://slashdot"? One obvious problem is what do you do about all the situations where there's x.com, x.org. x.net, etc. Well, the answer is, they all stay as they are, but we stop using TLDs for all new domains. So you could be just slashdot.
This means that your web browser would go to the A.root servers for the old TLDs, and instead of having a top-level server for each TLD, we'd have one for each letter of the alphabet (or whatever other characters in whatever other languages can start words, so that the language you're using is irrelevant and it isn't US-centric). Then we have a big ole distributed system of servers, each one of which serves a particular letter (or even group of letters, I dunno how fast those big-ass servers are).
So you've got a box that serves 'A' and 'B', one that serves 'C' and 'D', etc. That way, TLDs are a thing of the past.
The biggest problem of course is, who decides who gets which domains. And what about domain speculators (or people who are just rich jerks) who buy up hundreds or thousands of domain names?
How about a system where any given entity can only register one name per day? And it would cost something small, or maybe it would just be free.
Obviously this has a lot of work to go into it, but it certainly would be an improvement. Hierarchy is nice, but is it necessary? You could still of course register a name like "cia.usgovt" if the "usgovt" name wasn't already taken.
Maybe I'm just rambling. Oh well.
Aside from this?
m l
http://www.paymybills.com/securityandprivacy.ht
I personally am in a sort of meta-confusion state about the whole "respect my privacy!" thing that some Slashdotters (and other privacy advocates) go on about. I don't care what anyone knows about me if they aren't going to use it for a nefarious purpose. Oh no! Someone knows how much electricity I use. Oh no! Someone knows who I call on my telephone.
I don't consider sending junk mail to be nefarious, nor do I have a problem with targeted advertising -- I'd much rather see ads for things I'm interested in, instead of things I'm not. (Wouldn't you? Of course, I'd rather not see ads *at all* but given as it's not much of an option...) When junk mail comes, I chuck it. Sometimes I contact the mailer if I can, and order them to remove me from their mailing list. I usually back this up with lots of threats of lawsuits and criminal proceedings, and they're happy to comply after that...
What's the company going to do with my VIN exactly? I'm confused on that one. And water and electricity... what is it exactly that they are going to *do* with all this information?
Incidentally, I almost never use my land line for making phone calls; I average ONE long-distance call per month. I use my cellphone for everything else, but the phone numbers I call are not listed on my cell phone bill. I can change this if I want, but I haven't wanted to yet. But even if they did have all this info, WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO WITH IT?!
Please note that I am NOT saying that they are not going to do anything with it, NOR am I saying that there isn't anything they could do with it. I really, honestly, WANT TO KNOW what it is they [could/are going to] do with it that would be so terrible as to warrant the hassle of paying my bills by hand...
This is only true mostly because people aren't aware of electronic alternatives. I personally use a site called paymybills.com. Basically I told all my billers to send the bills to their address in Virginia; I get email whenever a new bill arrives. paymybills scans the bill in, enters all the appropriate data (due date, minimum payment, total bill balance), and I can pay my bills (har har) with a couple clicks of the mouse. It's awesome. It's not free, something like $8 bucks a month, but that's easily worth the reduction in hassle and effort I used to put into mailing paper bills.
Wells Fargo, my bank, also has their own version of this accessible through their website, but I was using pmb before I was aware of that, and it's not really worth the effort to change (and it's not free, either, it's still something like $5 a month with WF -- yeah I could save $3 a month, but whatever).
PMB also lets you, at the end of each year, buy (for something like $20) a CD containing your entire bill archives for the year. Spiffy. Naturally there's all sorts of other features I've not mentioned (automatic payment, ability to set up recurring payments for things like rent where you don't get sent a bill, etc.).
Anyone with a computer can put the days of paper behind them.
"It's not a conspiracy to prevent piracy, it's just the laser! The laser doesn't pick up CD-R's well, it's just the way it works!"
Did it ever occur to you people that maybe when DVD was being developed, there might have been a conversation that went like this:
Engineer: "Well, this 60nm blue laser we're using works great, EXCEPT it won't read CD-Rs."
Executive: "CD-R? What's that? Is that like a CD?"
Engineer: "Well yeah, it's a recordable CD, so people can write their own CDs. You know, they can backup data, make custom music CDs, whatever."
Executive: "Oh really."
(Later.)
Executive: "Well the engineer said they COULD use another type of laser, or a dual-laser doohickey, so it could read CD-Rs, but, ah, you know how [Hollywood | the music division of our humongous multinational greed-driven conglomerate | the lawyers] is/are about recordable media..."
Executive 2: "Good point. Let's stick with the single blue laser. No copying for you! Muahahaha!"
Executive: "Muahahaha!"
Okay, it probably wasn't that nefarious, but did it ever occur to you that they chose that type of laser PARTIALLY BECAUSE IT CAN'T READ CD-Rs WELL?
Note that I am not claiming that this is what happened, but I find it nearly amazing that no one here even bothered to entertain the possibility.
...who saw that the White House link went to a directory called "hot_releases" and immediately formed a mental image of something called "Washington's Wildest Interns"?
Ahem:
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.