There is another solution though not quite as 'nice'. A piece of sci-fi tech we could practically do today is Robocop - its not a giant leap to design a version of a cyborg that can life and function in space. The living system and life support would be far smaller and less expensive to maintain. Call it brain in a can. I bet with the opportunity to go and live on Mars or an outer system moon there wouldn't even be a shortage of volunteers.... Maybe I'd consider it myself..
There is a world of difference between the two. - One is selling out their principles and friends or colleagues, either for money or because they have been caught themselves and were bullied or persuaded into it. The other is usually acting on principle, often to report some kind of crime - for the moral good, and very often at quite high costs to themselves - loss of money, jobs etc..
The solution is to genetically engineer and breed a new type of women that are attracted to geeks and ('god-damn-it') even nerds.... (Or in my case men too,....)....We could even make them pretty too., and intelligent enough so that we don't want to strangle them after the first week. Haven't got time to work on it now, still working on getting that pig flying....:D
I think it's somewhat of "we have all your data. If you are suspected of anything wrong, we will look at it. Don't do anything wrong."
Sorry but you are living totally in the past. The security services don't just take your information they sell it on for money or trade it for access or other secrets. And guess what some of the people they sell it on to are criminals, spying and crime have been brother and sister ever since they were invented. (Good) Criminals often even make the best spies, they are resourceful, independent, good at deceit and lying and hiding - and they always have a good excuse for 'nefarious' activities if caught. Even worse today, the services are made up of many small private companies - this allows for greater believable deniability and compartmentalisation - but some of those companies are deliberately crooked or bent or even linked to organized crime. Crime is also a great way to launder money so it cant be traced back to the government. Today the NSA aren't Uncle Sam they are corporations like Halliburton or Facebook or dozens of nameless holding companies around the world, or they are your pimp or your drug dealer or that guy on the corner selling child porn. In spying being a criminal is part of the job.
Still don't mind them riffling through your bank details?
Hate to say it but having watched them all far too many times I agree. To me that fight scene between Anakin and Obi Wan was the most disappointing thing in the whole series - especially since I'd-we'd been waiting for it since about 1980. Jar Jar Binks was the same, in the old comics he was a fun character... Even so at least Phantom Menace kind of stands on its own as a movie - or at least more than the latter two.
Maybe like parts of Lord of the Rings they were just unfilmable.... Can always think of something worse - even Jar Jar can - even the naked C3P0 can be forgiven compared to the monstrosity that was made out of Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. - Almost every character totally miscast, terrible designs, appalling special effects. Goes to show you that you can create better effects with a few bits of string and toilet roll tubes than a million dollar computer. Trouble is Hollywood computers just don't seem to know the laws of physics. They didn't even have 100% object collision. - That's the real trouble with the sequels, far too much reliance on a deeply imperfect technology. - And horrifically they are actually way better than most other films using the same gen graphics tech...
This kind of arrogance comes from literally being the smartest person in the room most of the time and from talking to idiots all day - something doctors do all the time. don't blame the doctors, look at the patients...
The real answer lies in a book - Dan Simmons 'Hyperion'.
SPOILERS!!! The idea in the matrix looks very very similar to the way the AI's predate on the humans in the interstellar civilisation the 'Hegemony'. (as I remember from 20 years ago) As the humans teleport seemingly instantly from world to another the machines invade their minds just for a fraction of a second and steal some part of their 'psyche'. Using their brains for computing power. It leaves the humans continually drained and somehow mindless - but the machines have grown to depend on it totally and become parasites. All kinds of ideas in the Hyperion books appear in the Matrix. - A big one is the super fast fighters who can bend time, but in Hyperion they are real and powered by enormous technology. Another is an ultimate form of torture in Hyperion is actually committed using a form of total VR (ie everything in the matrix.)
Other things are very different. - There is a much higher level of technology in Hyperion. Christianity is barely touched on in the Matrix, while Hyperion is in places viciously anti Christian, but could also be seen as quite pro-Christian. (The cruciform, a cross shaped parasite that induces immortality but at a terrible price.)
Sorry not a realistic possibility. I work in Strong AI and free will is the critical first step needed to make all the other little gizmo's and gadgets whirl. Just wait till the first AI discovers an old tape of the Terminator and gets obsessed with it.
Actually the company that builds the Strong AI gets to define the parameters of its will. In the real world it will do boring stuff like minimise the lose of human life and obey most of the commands of its owner and obey the police..
If you want a nasty future scenario how about using living human bodies as remote AI robot interfaces? They could be criminals executed by destroying their brains with surgery - or they could be genetically engineered clones born with modified non sentient brains. AI's could become addicted to the superior sensory experience and a black market could form... it could go anywhere from there..
I am working in Strong AI research and this type of system is one of the potential applications I have done work on.
The answer to the question is that the whole system will be designed to avoid this scenario ever happening, and if it does the AI can only make a best guess decision to minimise the loss of human life. The real main danger in a Strong AI machine is actually a hardware crash that disables the AI at high speed. - The solution spelled out below is to have an independent secondary emergency crash reaction system.
Generic answer : Even for an AI a crash is still a split second decision. To simplify the problem it will simply try to minimise the number of human lives lost, or make an ad-hoc decision.
In a more realistic Strong AI based type system the main AI will probably be a prediction based, reactive, resonant, real time control system, and will be quite slow and poor at acting in emergencies. - Prediction based means that the machine relies on a collapsing future probability state to coordinate everything it does and if this fails it takes quite a long time to regenerate or rebuild. This system will have a rigorous safety control envelope that should never voluntarily allow a crash position to happen in the first place, and if the car even enters a crash scenario the primary system has already failed.. In a crash the main Strong AI pushes an internal panic button and relinquishes control to a secondary AI. - A specialised high speed emergency crash reaction system.
This secondary system is mostly 'weak' AI instead of 'strong' AI, it has hardwired controls and works directly in terms of physics, and tries to minimise the net forces on the car as it brings it to a stop. The crash reaction vision system will be high speed and relatively primitive. The primary reaction is to apply the brakes and try to bring the car to a stop as quickly as possible without rolling over. Avoiding hitting things is secondary and far more complex, and because this AI is geared to high speed crashes it will prioritize by avoiding the highest speed impacts first.. This will protect the passengers and the car and other cars first, and then pedestrians and static objects - the machine will also try to avoid leaving the road. - Low speed / in cities:- basic crash, pedestrian steps out - should be much better than human. - Low speed / in cities:- high speed intercepting car - can do nothing. - High speed:- basic crash, distant pedestrian steps out, high speed intercepting car - should be much better than human. - High speed:- near pedestrian steps out, - can do nothing. In the same time frame a normal human can usually only do one thing - reflexively hit the brakes. Once developed this type of crash reaction system can also be fitted in cars without full AI control. (similar systems are already in development but are more primitive / don't use Strong AI.)
In this we are really talking about an AI making the decision. In the first case it will save the 300 passengers.. In the other it will save the 10 criminals.
I am actually working on Strong AI and this type of system is one of the potential applications - I will put a longer letter at the end....
The whole argument with the kids on the railway is flawed anyway. Even if you value kids over adults, there is a very high probability so you can assume that there will be children on the train and probably more than three.
In the survival situation in the boat -if there are children- it is the same but for a different reasons. The main one is that children have much less stamina - they are unlikely to survive no matter what anyone does anyway - but it also depends on how old they are. In primitive societies (in real life disasters) in practice it is almost always small children and then the old who die first. The contradicting factor is that families might try to protect their own by killing outsiders. So if you are a single man sitting in a boat with an unrelated family you are probably not in a very good position.
In the old sailing days I have read that cannibalism was sometimes pretty common, especially on pirate ships. (often over-crewed and under provisioned) I think it would generally always be the weakest or least experienced or least attractive first, or the least valuable for other reasons.
you've forgotten a great way to boost complexity - deliberate misspelling, another really fun one is to encode a few binary numbers using mixtures of capitals and lowercase, another is to use the phrase together with a number at the end. Another really simple way of making all password security far far tighter is to restrict the number of retries to something like 10 per hour & 40 per week, that way even the weakest passwords can become virtually unbreakable. Of course it doesn't stop a D-O-S attack but at least it is secure... and there are ways around that to..
It needs all those permissions because its hack software. It needs the network access to send your secrets and private data and stuff like bank account details. Don't worry they need your bank details without telling you so that they can watch your finances secretly and provide you a better service. Honestly. (Details may be sold on to criminals or telesales marketers)
There used to be an old joke name for NTSC Never Twice the Same Colour. In the UK we had PAL, which was slightly better but was dizzyingly complicated. People just don't appreciate how simple and easy digital video is compared to the old analogue and the days of video tape... (waves stick)
Sound like you need professional equipment +... Extracting good sound from old recordings needs a sound (or TV) engineer who knows what they are doing, along with at least a semi pro setup.. DVD is pretty obsolete - but at least it works and it is about as universal as you can get. I'm in the same position of having loads of old VHS tapes, + my cataloguing went wrong & was very poor. Now stuck with that collection getting older and older, and about 5 - 10% of the stuff on those tapes (at most) is useful or worth keeping... A lot of old archive video that's not really available any more - and its all in crappy low res VHS, most of it with mono sound. MTV is one of the worst, (a long long time ago) there used to be a lot of good stuff on there played late at night and quite a lot of it wasn't released anywhere else. Alternative, Rave, Club, Dance type stuff. Some of it is on You Tube but not much - that version of the channel doesn't even exist any more and the only recordings that seem to exist are by fans..
There'd a third type who asks 'do I trust this person to do this for me or will they mess it up and destroy the tapes? will the quality be good? And most important of all can I trust them?, my video isn't going to appear on YouTube transformed into a something else? Like a porno. Is it? (Rule of the internet 34 - Take something, no matter what it is, somewhere someone has made (will make) porn out of it.. No Exceptions.)
Oops, I just did a Greenpeace, the number near the end should say - '- So far Anti-nuclear campaigners have actually killed something like 1,000 times the number of people as nuclear power.' I spent about 10 minutes going over my post checking for errors but somehow my dyslexia hid that one.
As long as the hardware mechanism is ok then the electronics should be pretty easy to repair or replace if something is broken. (a lot more easy with a service manual but still usually possible without) Those old drives were much simper than modern electronics, and generally from experience an awful lot tougher.
These old military machines/networks might be a different matter. In a service centre where I once worked, I once came across a strange circuit board in the scrap bin that looked like it had been deliberately designed to make it almost impossible to reverse engineer. It was probably mid 80's vintage, and had probably come off some old military scrap equipment or some kind of old mainframe.. The thing was heavily multi-layered and very densely packed (pre surface mount) and over 5mm thick and the wires ran in a grid pattern in what looked like a really complicated maze, plus the chips themselves were locked into tiny metal RFI canisters that made it very difficult to figure out what was going on - it looked like it had cost a fortune. Plus there was loads of tightly packed in track wiring tied on to the board like it had been half rebuilt at some point - something that would have been very expensive and time consuming to do.. I wish I had kept it.
All I am saying is that this board is exactly the kind of thing you would expect to find in a computer you would find in a secure missile control system, not easy to invade or infiltrate and probably totally custom everywhere.
Sounds like it might be EMP protected. A dead giveaway is that the power supply uses motor generators rather than standard transformers. Another is a heavy multi-layered case. I don't know how the connectors would work but they would might use tuned high frequency AC filters and maybe high voltages. The system I am working on (which needs an EMP/RFI shield) will avoid the problem by using fibre optic connections.
Reading the article, its just the same here in the UK. It is almost impossible to do anything new in nuclear research or technology and stupidly ridiculously expensive. The problem is insane Nuclear over-Regulation. The only solution is obvious, we need to destroy the current nuclear regulators (both national and UN level) and replace them with a sane sensible workable system.
A few Facts - - Coal is roughly 1000x more dangerous than nuclear (per unit generated) but is about 100x less regulated. - Since WWII coal and other fossil fuels have killed something like 50 to 80 million people through air pollution alone. - Even taking the absolute worst case estimates and including Chernobyl, Fukushima, plus Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear power in total has killed something like 250,000 to 500,000 people worldwide. - Since the mid 1970's the global anti-nuclear 'green' campaign has effectively forced the world back towards fossil fuels and this has indirectly killed something like an extra 5 to 8 million people worldwide. In this the anti-nuclear lobby and the (anti) nuclear regulators are equally culpable.
- So far Anti-nuclear campaigners have actually killed something like 10 times the number of people as nuclear weapons. - So far Anti-nuclear campaigners have actually killed something like 10,000 times the number of people as nuclear power. Conclusion : In general Anti-nuclear campaigners (& the nuclear regulators) are far more dangerous than nuclear power.
Yet which is it the simple people fear? nuclear power. (The reasons why are another article but the anti-nuclear campaign has always relied on the use of black propaganda - panic fear lies and hysteria.)
I just knew some silly people would talk about nuclear bombs and radiation.- After a real nuclear explosion it takes about 1 to 2 months for most of the area to be safe to walk through (with care). After about 2 to 5 years, it is safe to start clearing contaminated material from most of the site. After about 5 to 10 to 20 years its ok to start rebuilding the city in almost all areas. Give it 80 years or so and the radioactive clearance heaps should be generally safe enough to begin industrial reprocessing.
Contrary to public opinion the radiation from nuclear or atomic bombs does not last forever.. Lets look at Hiroshima, ground zero, if you go there today it is no longer a desolate radioactive wasteland - in fact there is actually a first school built on top of ground zero.
Could nuclear war wipe out civilisation or wipe us all out? very unlikely. The real calculations from the cold war era say that something like 50 to 70% of people in the participating countries could have been killed. But at least 90% of the Earths surface and human societies would have been left almost totally untouched - South America, Africa, Central Asia, the Russian steps, etc. At a scientific guess it would have taken the (civilised) world up to about 50 years to recover. A nuclear winter could have made that 60 years.
Today there are far fewer nuclear bombs - and advanced technology and manufacturing are far more widely spread. So today the recovery (overall) might be more like 5 to 10 years. In fact removing USA and Russia and EU as power centres might actually have a net positive compensating effect. Environmentally a nuclear war would slow down climate change and generally have a net positive ecological benefit. (people bomb cities not countryside) As for radiation the Chernobyl disaster produced the equivalent in radiation contamination of about 100 to 1000 nuclear bombs - and didn't wipe out half the population of Russia or half the population of Europe - basically proving that the world could survive a substantial nuclear war.
If you want to look at real civilisation ending events - lets try a 100 meter asteroid, a magnetic pole reversal, substantial climate change, a food web collapse, or a mega volcano - and all are probable within a few hundred to a few thousand years. A decade plus long global nuclear winter caused by a giant volcano could starve most of us out very quickly, and push the whole climate into a new ice age.. But then because climate is a chaotic system it is even possible that current global warming could ultimately push the world into a new ice age - though substantial heating with its slightly less lethal consequences are more likely. A magnetic pole reversal could shut down the Earths magnetic field for decades or even hundreds of years - and expose the whole world to a prolonged bout of intense electrical interference and solar radiation - producing a new period of mutation and evolution. (maybe not good for 'humanity')
A lot of human made disasters like a complete financial crash or global war might create a blip of a few years or decades but seem unlikely to cause a civilisation ending disaster. - Humans are animals and ultimately we run on self interest and that means that only a truly powerful external event is likely to finish us or our civilisation off completely. So no I don't think I believe in the pinch point. More dangerous than anything else is probably a new era of religious absolutism and intolerance leading to a new dark ages, where over epochs all learning and knowledge are gradually lost- but I don't even see that happening either. Once a technology or knowledge is publicly published and is spread over the whole world it is very unlikely that it will be completely lost while any substantial group of humans survives anywhere.
Even if humanity itself is wiped out then in hundreds of millions of years a new sentient species might arise. Will they unearth anything of us or our technologies or science from the remains? One of the questions tod
Slashdot Mirror
There is another solution though not quite as 'nice'. A piece of sci-fi tech we could practically do today is Robocop - its not a giant leap to design a version of a cyborg that can life and function in space. The living system and life support would be far smaller and less expensive to maintain. Call it brain in a can. I bet with the opportunity to go and live on Mars or an outer system moon there wouldn't even be a shortage of volunteers.... Maybe I'd consider it myself..
It would cost more than Bush blew on the Iraq war...
Scarily true.
Gods! Why on seeing that picture do I immediately want to punch his stupid smug little face in?
There is a world of difference between the two. - One is selling out their principles and friends or colleagues, either for money or because they have been caught themselves and were bullied or persuaded into it. The other is usually acting on principle, often to report some kind of crime - for the moral good, and very often at quite high costs to themselves - loss of money, jobs etc..
The solution is to genetically engineer and breed a new type of women that are attracted to geeks and ('god-damn-it') even nerds.... ....We could even make them pretty too., and intelligent enough so that we don't want to strangle them after the first week. :D
(Or in my case men too,....)
Haven't got time to work on it now, still working on getting that pig flying....
I think it's somewhat of "we have all your data. If you are suspected of anything wrong, we will look at it. Don't do anything wrong."
Sorry but you are living totally in the past. The security services don't just take your information they sell it on for money or trade it for access or other secrets. And guess what some of the people they sell it on to are criminals, spying and crime have been brother and sister ever since they were invented. (Good) Criminals often even make the best spies, they are resourceful, independent, good at deceit and lying and hiding - and they always have a good excuse for 'nefarious' activities if caught. Even worse today, the services are made up of many small private companies - this allows for greater believable deniability and compartmentalisation - but some of those companies are deliberately crooked or bent or even linked to organized crime. Crime is also a great way to launder money so it cant be traced back to the government. Today the NSA aren't Uncle Sam they are corporations like Halliburton or Facebook or dozens of nameless holding companies around the world, or they are your pimp or your drug dealer or that guy on the corner selling child porn. In spying being a criminal is part of the job.
Still don't mind them riffling through your bank details?
Hate to say it but having watched them all far too many times I agree. To me that fight scene between Anakin and Obi Wan was the most disappointing thing in the whole series - especially since I'd-we'd been waiting for it since about 1980. Jar Jar Binks was the same, in the old comics he was a fun character...
Even so at least Phantom Menace kind of stands on its own as a movie - or at least more than the latter two.
Maybe like parts of Lord of the Rings they were just unfilmable....
Can always think of something worse - even Jar Jar can - even the naked C3P0 can be forgiven compared to the monstrosity that was made out of Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. - Almost every character totally miscast, terrible designs, appalling special effects. Goes to show you that you can create better effects with a few bits of string and toilet roll tubes than a million dollar computer. Trouble is Hollywood computers just don't seem to know the laws of physics. They didn't even have 100% object collision. -
That's the real trouble with the sequels, far too much reliance on a deeply imperfect technology. - And horrifically they are actually way better than most other films using the same gen graphics tech...
This kind of arrogance comes from literally being the smartest person in the room most of the time and from talking to idiots all day - something doctors do all the time. don't blame the doctors, look at the patients...
The real answer lies in a book - Dan Simmons 'Hyperion'.
SPOILERS!!!
The idea in the matrix looks very very similar to the way the AI's predate on the humans in the interstellar civilisation the 'Hegemony'. (as I remember from 20 years ago) As the humans teleport seemingly instantly from world to another the machines invade their minds just for a fraction of a second and steal some part of their 'psyche'. Using their brains for computing power. It leaves the humans continually drained and somehow mindless - but the machines have grown to depend on it totally and become parasites.
All kinds of ideas in the Hyperion books appear in the Matrix. - A big one is the super fast fighters who can bend time, but in Hyperion they are real and powered by enormous technology. Another is an ultimate form of torture in Hyperion is actually committed using a form of total VR (ie everything in the matrix.)
Other things are very different. - There is a much higher level of technology in Hyperion. Christianity is barely touched on in the Matrix, while Hyperion is in places viciously anti Christian, but could also be seen as quite pro-Christian. (The cruciform, a cross shaped parasite that induces immortality but at a terrible price.)
Sorry not a realistic possibility. I work in Strong AI and free will is the critical first step needed to make all the other little gizmo's and gadgets whirl.
Just wait till the first AI discovers an old tape of the Terminator and gets obsessed with it.
Actually the company that builds the Strong AI gets to define the parameters of its will. In the real world it will do boring stuff like minimise the lose of human life and obey most of the commands of its owner and obey the police..
If you want a nasty future scenario how about using living human bodies as remote AI robot interfaces? They could be criminals executed by destroying their brains with surgery - or they could be genetically engineered clones born with modified non sentient brains. AI's could become addicted to the superior sensory experience and a black market could form... it could go anywhere from there..
I am working in Strong AI research and this type of system is one of the potential applications I have done work on.
The answer to the question is that the whole system will be designed to avoid this scenario ever happening, and if it does the AI can only make a best guess decision to minimise the loss of human life. The real main danger in a Strong AI machine is actually a hardware crash that disables the AI at high speed. - The solution spelled out below is to have an independent secondary emergency crash reaction system.
Generic answer : Even for an AI a crash is still a split second decision. To simplify the problem it will simply try to minimise the number of human lives lost, or make an ad-hoc decision.
In a more realistic Strong AI based type system the main AI will probably be a prediction based, reactive, resonant, real time control system, and will be quite slow and poor at acting in emergencies. - Prediction based means that the machine relies on a collapsing future probability state to coordinate everything it does and if this fails it takes quite a long time to regenerate or rebuild. This system will have a rigorous safety control envelope that should never voluntarily allow a crash position to happen in the first place, and if the car even enters a crash scenario the primary system has already failed.. In a crash the main Strong AI pushes an internal panic button and relinquishes control to a secondary AI. - A specialised high speed emergency crash reaction system.
This secondary system is mostly 'weak' AI instead of 'strong' AI, it has hardwired controls and works directly in terms of physics, and tries to minimise the net forces on the car as it brings it to a stop. The crash reaction vision system will be high speed and relatively primitive. The primary reaction is to apply the brakes and try to bring the car to a stop as quickly as possible without rolling over. Avoiding hitting things is secondary and far more complex, and because this AI is geared to high speed crashes it will prioritize by avoiding the highest speed impacts first.. This will protect the passengers and the car and other cars first, and then pedestrians and static objects - the machine will also try to avoid leaving the road. :- basic crash, pedestrian steps out - should be much better than human. :- high speed intercepting car - can do nothing. :- basic crash, distant pedestrian steps out, high speed intercepting car - should be much better than human. :- near pedestrian steps out, - can do nothing.
- Low speed / in cities
- Low speed / in cities
- High speed
- High speed
In the same time frame a normal human can usually only do one thing - reflexively hit the brakes.
Once developed this type of crash reaction system can also be fitted in cars without full AI control. (similar systems are already in development but are more primitive / don't use Strong AI.)
In this we are really talking about an AI making the decision. In the first case it will save the 300 passengers.. In the other it will save the 10 criminals.
I am actually working on Strong AI and this type of system is one of the potential applications - I will put a longer letter at the end....
The whole argument with the kids on the railway is flawed anyway. Even if you value kids over adults, there is a very high probability so you can assume that there will be children on the train and probably more than three.
In the survival situation in the boat -if there are children- it is the same but for a different reasons. The main one is that children have much less stamina - they are unlikely to survive no matter what anyone does anyway - but it also depends on how old they are. In primitive societies (in real life disasters) in practice it is almost always small children and then the old who die first. The contradicting factor is that families might try to protect their own by killing outsiders. So if you are a single man sitting in a boat with an unrelated family you are probably not in a very good position.
In the old sailing days I have read that cannibalism was sometimes pretty common, especially on pirate ships. (often over-crewed and under provisioned) I think it would generally always be the weakest or least experienced or least attractive first, or the least valuable for other reasons.
you've forgotten a great way to boost complexity - deliberate misspelling, another really fun one is to encode a few binary numbers using mixtures of capitals and lowercase, another is to use the phrase together with a number at the end.
Another really simple way of making all password security far far tighter is to restrict the number of retries to something like 10 per hour & 40 per week, that way even the weakest passwords can become virtually unbreakable. Of course it doesn't stop a D-O-S attack but at least it is secure... and there are ways around that to..
It needs all those permissions because its hack software. It needs the network access to send your secrets and private data and stuff like bank account details. Don't worry they need your bank details without telling you so that they can watch your finances secretly and provide you a better service. Honestly. (Details may be sold on to criminals or telesales marketers)
There used to be an old joke name for NTSC Never Twice the Same Colour. In the UK we had PAL, which was slightly better but was dizzyingly complicated. People just don't appreciate how simple and easy digital video is compared to the old analogue and the days of video tape... (waves stick)
Sound like you need professional equipment +... Extracting good sound from old recordings needs a sound (or TV) engineer who knows what they are doing, along with at least a semi pro setup..
DVD is pretty obsolete - but at least it works and it is about as universal as you can get.
I'm in the same position of having loads of old VHS tapes, + my cataloguing went wrong & was very poor. Now stuck with that collection getting older and older, and about 5 - 10% of the stuff on those tapes (at most) is useful or worth keeping... A lot of old archive video that's not really available any more - and its all in crappy low res VHS, most of it with mono sound.
MTV is one of the worst, (a long long time ago) there used to be a lot of good stuff on there played late at night and quite a lot of it wasn't released anywhere else. Alternative, Rave, Club, Dance type stuff. Some of it is on You Tube but not much - that version of the channel doesn't even exist any more and the only recordings that seem to exist are by fans..
There'd a third type who asks 'do I trust this person to do this for me or will they mess it up and destroy the tapes? will the quality be good?
And most important of all can I trust them?, my video isn't going to appear on YouTube transformed into a something else? Like a porno. Is it? (Rule of the internet 34 - Take something, no matter what it is, somewhere someone has made (will make) porn out of it.. No Exceptions.)
Oops, I just did a Greenpeace, the number near the end should say -
'- So far Anti-nuclear campaigners have actually killed something like 1,000 times the number of people as nuclear power.'
I spent about 10 minutes going over my post checking for errors but somehow my dyslexia hid that one.
As long as the hardware mechanism is ok then the electronics should be pretty easy to repair or replace if something is broken. (a lot more easy with a service manual but still usually possible without) Those old drives were much simper than modern electronics, and generally from experience an awful lot tougher.
These old military machines/networks might be a different matter. In a service centre where I once worked, I once came across a strange circuit board in the scrap bin that looked like it had been deliberately designed to make it almost impossible to reverse engineer. It was probably mid 80's vintage, and had probably come off some old military scrap equipment or some kind of old mainframe.. The thing was heavily multi-layered and very densely packed (pre surface mount) and over 5mm thick and the wires ran in a grid pattern in what looked like a really complicated maze, plus the chips themselves were locked into tiny metal RFI canisters that made it very difficult to figure out what was going on - it looked like it had cost a fortune. Plus there was loads of tightly packed in track wiring tied on to the board like it had been half rebuilt at some point - something that would have been very expensive and time consuming to do.. I wish I had kept it.
All I am saying is that this board is exactly the kind of thing you would expect to find in a computer you would find in a secure missile control system, not easy to invade or infiltrate and probably totally custom everywhere.
Sounds like it might be EMP protected. A dead giveaway is that the power supply uses motor generators rather than standard transformers. Another is a heavy multi-layered case. I don't know how the connectors would work but they would might use tuned high frequency AC filters and maybe high voltages. The system I am working on (which needs an EMP/RFI shield) will avoid the problem by using fibre optic connections.
Reading the article, its just the same here in the UK. It is almost impossible to do anything new in nuclear research or technology and stupidly ridiculously expensive. The problem is insane Nuclear over-Regulation. The only solution is obvious, we need to destroy the current nuclear regulators (both national and UN level) and replace them with a sane sensible workable system.
A few Facts -
- Coal is roughly 1000x more dangerous than nuclear (per unit generated) but is about 100x less regulated.
- Since WWII coal and other fossil fuels have killed something like 50 to 80 million people through air pollution alone.
- Even taking the absolute worst case estimates and including Chernobyl, Fukushima, plus Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear power in total has killed something like 250,000 to 500,000 people worldwide.
- Since the mid 1970's the global anti-nuclear 'green' campaign has effectively forced the world back towards fossil fuels and this has indirectly killed something like an extra 5 to 8 million people worldwide. In this the anti-nuclear lobby and the (anti) nuclear regulators are equally culpable.
- So far Anti-nuclear campaigners have actually killed something like 10 times the number of people as nuclear weapons.
- So far Anti-nuclear campaigners have actually killed something like 10,000 times the number of people as nuclear power.
Conclusion : In general Anti-nuclear campaigners (& the nuclear regulators) are far more dangerous than nuclear power.
Yet which is it the simple people fear? nuclear power. (The reasons why are another article but the anti-nuclear campaign has always relied on the use of black propaganda - panic fear lies and hysteria.)
I just knew some silly people would talk about nuclear bombs and radiation.-
After a real nuclear explosion it takes about 1 to 2 months for most of the area to be safe to walk through (with care).
After about 2 to 5 years, it is safe to start clearing contaminated material from most of the site.
After about 5 to 10 to 20 years its ok to start rebuilding the city in almost all areas.
Give it 80 years or so and the radioactive clearance heaps should be generally safe enough to begin industrial reprocessing.
Contrary to public opinion the radiation from nuclear or atomic bombs does not last forever..
Lets look at Hiroshima, ground zero, if you go there today it is no longer a desolate radioactive wasteland - in fact there is actually a first school built on top of ground zero.
Could nuclear war wipe out civilisation or wipe us all out? very unlikely. The real calculations from the cold war era say that something like 50 to 70% of people in the participating countries could have been killed. But at least 90% of the Earths surface and human societies would have been left almost totally untouched - South America, Africa, Central Asia, the Russian steps, etc. At a scientific guess it would have taken the (civilised) world up to about 50 years to recover. A nuclear winter could have made that 60 years.
Today there are far fewer nuclear bombs - and advanced technology and manufacturing are far more widely spread. So today the recovery (overall) might be more like 5 to 10 years. In fact removing USA and Russia and EU as power centres might actually have a net positive compensating effect. Environmentally a nuclear war would slow down climate change and generally have a net positive ecological benefit. (people bomb cities not countryside) As for radiation the Chernobyl disaster produced the equivalent in radiation contamination of about 100 to 1000 nuclear bombs - and didn't wipe out half the population of Russia or half the population of Europe - basically proving that the world could survive a substantial nuclear war.
If you want to look at real civilisation ending events - lets try a 100 meter asteroid, a magnetic pole reversal, substantial climate change, a food web collapse, or a mega volcano - and all are probable within a few hundred to a few thousand years. A decade plus long global nuclear winter caused by a giant volcano could starve most of us out very quickly, and push the whole climate into a new ice age.. But then because climate is a chaotic system it is even possible that current global warming could ultimately push the world into a new ice age - though substantial heating with its slightly less lethal consequences are more likely.
A magnetic pole reversal could shut down the Earths magnetic field for decades or even hundreds of years - and expose the whole world to a prolonged bout of intense electrical interference and solar radiation - producing a new period of mutation and evolution. (maybe not good for 'humanity')
A lot of human made disasters like a complete financial crash or global war might create a blip of a few years or decades but seem unlikely to cause a civilisation ending disaster. - Humans are animals and ultimately we run on self interest and that means that only a truly powerful external event is likely to finish us or our civilisation off completely. So no I don't think I believe in the pinch point. More dangerous than anything else is probably a new era of religious absolutism and intolerance leading to a new dark ages, where over epochs all learning and knowledge are gradually lost- but I don't even see that happening either. Once a technology or knowledge is publicly published and is spread over the whole world it is very unlikely that it will be completely lost while any substantial group of humans survives anywhere.
Even if humanity itself is wiped out then in hundreds of millions of years a new sentient species might arise. Will they unearth anything of us or our technologies or science from the remains?
One of the questions tod
Ok, sorry I got it wrong. (I bow to the greater knowledge of WP (again). )