I'm just waiting for someone to send a Sorcerer's Apprentice nanobuilder colony there, instruct it to cover the Moon three feet below the surface, mine the heck out of the layers below that, and then in a matter of weeks, cover the entire surface with commercial and civil structures, plus sufficient defence capability to fend off any stupid reactions.
Given that any kind of military response would have to involve the costs of not only getting out of a gravity well, but then attempting to establish a beachhead where every square foot of surface is already occupied by buildings, defended by rock-throwers and whatever other systems have been cooked up (surface-to-orbit missiles, ground-based lasers, enough co-ordinated crap in orbit to make anyone waste all their fuel on evasive manouvers), and swarming with invasion-eating nanobots, I can't see anyone bothering to make a physical attempt. They'd probably try angling for gaining control of part or all of the hyperstructure by digital attacks, espionage, or legal/diplomatic pressure.
Especially if it can be found out who (if anyone) is in charge of it.
Really, at some point you'd pretty much need to have a human population up there that considered the Moon to be a single legal/international entity and themselves to be citizens of it over and above any similar ties to any Earth-based country.
Alternatively, have chunks of the Moon operating independently of one another. They might be their own states; they might be extensions of Earth-based states. Their alleigances could well be all over the place, and the Moon would just be another economic and legal frontier battleground.
I was a tech for ten years, and it was OK much of the time. I didn't want to be doing this for the rest of my life, though.
So I sat down and took about eight hours to work out how to pay the bills and live reasonably well without having to work more than a couple of hours a year, and without having to deal with customers, clients, bosses, or co-workers. It was really just a matter of applying an I.T. mindset to bank policies and patterns in the real estate market, and extrapolating from first principles.
I ran the prototype system alongside my normal job for a year or so to iron out the bugs, and then quit being a tech. These days I can sleep in, go shopping during normal business hours, and take a vacation whenever I want. It's been less than a year so far, but it seems to be working well. I'm not driving matched Ferraris carved from a single block of platinum, but as long as I can buy groceries and the occasional tech-toy, I value the free time more than the extra money I could make by going back to the old 9-5.
That's just me, though, and I planned much of my particular situation based on my personal psychology - what would make me happy, rather than mega-rich. Other people might have different goals or preferences.
Are there any sites or services in which you'd voluntarily look at ads to lend a hand?
No. Not a single one. In fact, I would (and do) take time, effort and money to configure my computer to specifically exclude such wastes of my paid-for bandwidth.
I have at least three spam filters (ISP, home mail server, POP client) on my email.
I have ISP and personal spam filters on my Usenet feed.
I have multiple regex blocks applicable to my browsers, 99% targetted at in-page advertising.
And hey, my bandwidth use has dropped into a cheaper bracket. So not only am I unperturbed by advertisements for crap on the other side of the world, I save money.
To advertisers: I already follow fifty-seven news feeds, including multiple ones about new products in areas of personal interest. If I'm not buying your product, it's because either I don't want it, or I don't consider the product list of your particular industry niche to be worth my time. If I ever want to buy something in that niche, I will go do research on it at that time.
And guess what - if there's an entire product niche that I don't know about, and have never even heard a whisper or hint about from family, friends or blogs, there's a fairly good chance that I don't freakin' need any product in that niche.
If and when I get or build a PVR-alike, it will be set to delete or block ads. I already don't watch live TV any more. I prefer DVD players which can skip the pre-main-menu crap and any trailers/ads, too. I don't buy newspapers, and if there was a way to get the free local ones on paper with the ads removed, I'd be looking into it.
"Pull" advertising I don't mind. If I go specifically looking for a product, then by all means try and sell it to me. But any form of "push" advertising irritates the hell out of me.
The whole idea about dropping the can isn't very good at all - if the arm can raise the can an inch off the surface, the little finger can be swung under the can to stop it falling out of the grip.
It's just an excuse for the current set of control systems not being able to handle movements for all five digits in real time.
Agreed about the cameras in public service areas. Of course, they'd need something to fuzz out or obscure computer screens or paperwork which might have personal details of particular members of the public (or just use low resolution cameras).
I was a public servant for over a decade, and worked most of that time in an office with 24/7 camera surveillance. I figured this was a good thing because I was all for public scrutiny of the dispersal of public funds. I would have preferred there to be some additional method of detecting stupid decisions and wastes of time and money in real-time as well, though. It would have been fun to think of a bunch of people clustered around a wall of monitors, when one flashes red and a watcher jabbers into a microphone "We have Bill from Executive Level 2 making a boneheaded decision... yes, I can see that he's seriously considering a really idiotic HR move... looks like he thinks it might save ten bucks in paperwork, but it will make everyone quit in three months. Get a strike team up there now!"
Anything computer-related more than five years old, half the stuff your parents learned that your grandparents didn't, and anything they teach in the SCA.
Except that there won't be just the single all-companies subscriber, will there? The information will still be available to sell to other people as well - unless Real et al are going to broadcast all of their own code's security flaws all over the net in real time.
Additionally, every company in the sign-up gang would have to be 100% sure that they were OK with their own security flaws being sent out to dozens, potentially hundreds of other companies. Is Real absolutely confident that there's no-one in Microsoft, SCO or Jimbo's Bait Shack & Warez who could possibly want to onsell, leak, or use the information to take Real down a peg?
On the plus side, you could advertize it as "For sale: Mobile cop magnet. Good for distracting the local fuzz and leading them miles out of their way. Suit accomplice, henchman, TV hero sidekick."
Bodytweaking in the future - it doesn't matter what body part you lose, you can regrow it.
New disease: uncontrolled teratomatic hypergenesis. Join the Akira club!
Or have software which completely scrambles the contents of the device on input of the wrong password. Too easy to give a wrong password, have the device scrambled, and then claim the investigators must have typoed it.
Of course, that would attract more suspicion than having a secondary set of data keyed to a second password. To make it seem plausible, make sure the fake data is something like ten gigs of (legal) softcore porn, plus every LOLcat ever made, plus compilations of several million lame jokes. They'll be trying to extract meaningful information from that lot for weeks!
Does it mean having the software physically on the premises? Use it for foundations. Does it mean having a certain number of hard disks with Windows on them as the OS? Dumpster diving, ebay, and the old janitor's closet can take care of that. Does it mean having the copy of Windows within a certain distance from the students? Under the floorboards counts, right?
Are they mandating that the students be forced to sit and use a Windows machine for a certain amount of time per day? Are they mandating what the student-facing interface has to look like?
It seems that for any condition set, there would be a way to get around it. Lawyers at dawn and all that.
Bring America into line with the civilised countries, aka the Coalition of Pinko Hippy Commie Tree-Huggers.
Fix the political system - make America an actual democracy and tilt the playing field in favor of third parties. Review the entire national budget and remove all the bits which boil down to chest-beating, pissing other countries off and underwriting bad industry. Used the money saved to pay America's bills, fix the education system, and provide better health care than Canada. Take corporate focus off pure moneymaking. Promote greater social interaction between neighbors.
Make America great again. Support innovation. Get America back into the top ten countries in the world for freedom of the populace and rational thought. Declare all religion to be a form of adult-only entertainment subject to the same taxes and restrictions on exposing minors to it. Drop the national borders completely and work something out with Mexico so people will want to live there just as much as in the US. Get some solid data on whether decriminalizing drugs altogether would cut down on violence and organized crime, and then follow the recommendations. Tell the states that unless they cut their gun death numbers by 90%, Measures Will Be Taken and they will only apply to those states.
Investigate every office-holding politician of the last ten years - it'll give the FBI something to chew on and they can hire the staff the CIA and military won't be able to afford any more. Disallow legal person rights to corporations. Fix the social security system so people aren't starving to death in disease-ridden slums any more.
Beef up public transport. Replace tariffs on high-fuel-efficiency imported cars with a subsidy. Tell local car manufacturers that if they can build something that meets the new standards, they get a subsidy too. As the efficiency of the average car on the road goes up, decrease the subsidies. Have them drop off entirely after ten years anyway. Ideally, make the calculation based on total running/repair costs of a vehicle so you don't end up with cars that run on a teaspoon of fuel but crap their parts out every ten miles.
Give people four years to stew about the changes. If, in the unlikely event that you're not assassinated, impeached on trumped-up charges or drummed out of office by multibilliondollar industries hurting badly, and in the REALLY unlikely event that you're re-elected under the new voting system, start fixing all the other things that need doing but no-one wants to touch politically. Like converting the US to metric.
At 34, and nominally still in tech support, I have no problem with telling management if I think their TS team needs serious mentoring to bring them up to scratch, and will offer to perform said mentoring.
Of course, I will expect to be compensated appropriately. But it's their decision. However, I have learned how to put the situation into business-speak so they can learn in ten minutes precisely how screwed they are and how badly they need to unclench their wallet muscles.
Oddly enough, I've never been told that if I don't like it, I can quit. Generally because I've already said things like "You're completely boned, and you know it. You need me and my skillset desperately. I've given you a list of things you need to fix in order to keep me here. That includes an N% pay rise (with N being anything up to and over three figures, depending). I already have five other employers fighting over who gets me at the end of this contract - you're welcome to start bidding at the figure I've given you. If you can't approve that, you're welcome to pass it up the chain for approval."
Often management they won't get their act into gear in time, or will offer measly 20-30% increases, or try and negotiate. In which case I just move on to the next job, and the next, and the next.
One place managed to hold on to me for seven years simply by being an awesome place to work. In the end, they canned the few managers who made the place actually work and I'd already maxed out their promotion ladder, so I moved on (I was the last senior tech to do so - call me sentimental).
Strangely enough, bosses at new employers aren't used to a tech who tells them exactly where they stand. Fortunately, although there are many problems in the world, this particular one isn't mine.
As an interesting point, I worked for over ten years as a public servant. Not in law enforcement, just office work. We had cameras everywhere, our computers were monitored for every keystroke, we needed ID cards to move between floors in the building, everything.
And it was a good thing, too, because we could prove what we were or were not doing while we were on the clock and the taxpayer's dollar.
If members of the public had wanted to tape me (audio or video) during work hours, that would have been A-OK with me - we had our own cameras so there would be no point in them screwing with the editing, and if they wanted evidence that I was doing my job, they could have it. (Of course, there would probably be privacy issues to address if I was working on someone's file, but the principle is sound.)
Slashdot Mirror
- if we can get enough bugs into it.
YOU ARE IN A 10' BY 10' ROOM
CONTENTS:
1 CHEST
1 ORC
You have your PC configured to show advertising? Can't see the advantage, myself.
Given that any kind of military response would have to involve the costs of not only getting out of a gravity well, but then attempting to establish a beachhead where every square foot of surface is already occupied by buildings, defended by rock-throwers and whatever other systems have been cooked up (surface-to-orbit missiles, ground-based lasers, enough co-ordinated crap in orbit to make anyone waste all their fuel on evasive manouvers), and swarming with invasion-eating nanobots, I can't see anyone bothering to make a physical attempt. They'd probably try angling for gaining control of part or all of the hyperstructure by digital attacks, espionage, or legal/diplomatic pressure.
Especially if it can be found out who (if anyone) is in charge of it.
Really, at some point you'd pretty much need to have a human population up there that considered the Moon to be a single legal/international entity and themselves to be citizens of it over and above any similar ties to any Earth-based country.
Alternatively, have chunks of the Moon operating independently of one another. They might be their own states; they might be extensions of Earth-based states. Their alleigances could well be all over the place, and the Moon would just be another economic and legal frontier battleground.
I was a tech for ten years, and it was OK much of the time. I didn't want to be doing this for the rest of my life, though. So I sat down and took about eight hours to work out how to pay the bills and live reasonably well without having to work more than a couple of hours a year, and without having to deal with customers, clients, bosses, or co-workers. It was really just a matter of applying an I.T. mindset to bank policies and patterns in the real estate market, and extrapolating from first principles. I ran the prototype system alongside my normal job for a year or so to iron out the bugs, and then quit being a tech. These days I can sleep in, go shopping during normal business hours, and take a vacation whenever I want. It's been less than a year so far, but it seems to be working well. I'm not driving matched Ferraris carved from a single block of platinum, but as long as I can buy groceries and the occasional tech-toy, I value the free time more than the extra money I could make by going back to the old 9-5. That's just me, though, and I planned much of my particular situation based on my personal psychology - what would make me happy, rather than mega-rich. Other people might have different goals or preferences.
We're just a few years away from being MatRix-rolled...
Story: Genius works out advertising industry is stupid, rich and gullible; sells them a crock of their own shit; shouts "America, fuck yeah!"
No. Not a single one. In fact, I would (and do) take time, effort and money to configure my computer to specifically exclude such wastes of my paid-for bandwidth.
I have at least three spam filters (ISP, home mail server, POP client) on my email.
I have ISP and personal spam filters on my Usenet feed.
I have multiple regex blocks applicable to my browsers, 99% targetted at in-page advertising.
And hey, my bandwidth use has dropped into a cheaper bracket. So not only am I unperturbed by advertisements for crap on the other side of the world, I save money.
To advertisers: I already follow fifty-seven news feeds, including multiple ones about new products in areas of personal interest. If I'm not buying your product, it's because either I don't want it, or I don't consider the product list of your particular industry niche to be worth my time. If I ever want to buy something in that niche, I will go do research on it at that time.
And guess what - if there's an entire product niche that I don't know about, and have never even heard a whisper or hint about from family, friends or blogs, there's a fairly good chance that I don't freakin' need any product in that niche.
If and when I get or build a PVR-alike, it will be set to delete or block ads. I already don't watch live TV any more. I prefer DVD players which can skip the pre-main-menu crap and any trailers/ads, too. I don't buy newspapers, and if there was a way to get the free local ones on paper with the ads removed, I'd be looking into it.
"Pull" advertising I don't mind. If I go specifically looking for a product, then by all means try and sell it to me. But any form of "push" advertising irritates the hell out of me.
The whole idea about dropping the can isn't very good at all - if the arm can raise the can an inch off the surface, the little finger can be swung under the can to stop it falling out of the grip.
It's just an excuse for the current set of control systems not being able to handle movements for all five digits in real time.
For $agency in CoS FBI CIA US_govt any-govt ; print "The cult of $agency has a long and..."
I was a public servant for over a decade, and worked most of that time in an office with 24/7 camera surveillance. I figured this was a good thing because I was all for public scrutiny of the dispersal of public funds. I would have preferred there to be some additional method of detecting stupid decisions and wastes of time and money in real-time as well, though. It would have been fun to think of a bunch of people clustered around a wall of monitors, when one flashes red and a watcher jabbers into a microphone "We have Bill from Executive Level 2 making a boneheaded decision... yes, I can see that he's seriously considering a really idiotic HR move... looks like he thinks it might save ten bucks in paperwork, but it will make everyone quit in three months. Get a strike team up there now!"
Anything computer-related more than five years old, half the stuff your parents learned that your grandparents didn't, and anything they teach in the SCA.
Except that there won't be just the single all-companies subscriber, will there? The information will still be available to sell to other people as well - unless Real et al are going to broadcast all of their own code's security flaws all over the net in real time.
Additionally, every company in the sign-up gang would have to be 100% sure that they were OK with their own security flaws being sent out to dozens, potentially hundreds of other companies. Is Real absolutely confident that there's no-one in Microsoft, SCO or Jimbo's Bait Shack & Warez who could possibly want to onsell, leak, or use the information to take Real down a peg?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-zUAb_ndDk
On the plus side, you could advertize it as "For sale: Mobile cop magnet. Good for distracting the local fuzz and leading them miles out of their way. Suit accomplice, henchman, TV hero sidekick."
Bodytweaking in the future - it doesn't matter what body part you lose, you can regrow it. New disease: uncontrolled teratomatic hypergenesis. Join the Akira club!
- the company giving the records, gratis, to a second company coincidentally owned by the same people, which then sells the records for profit?
Of course, that would attract more suspicion than having a secondary set of data keyed to a second password. To make it seem plausible, make sure the fake data is something like ten gigs of (legal) softcore porn, plus every LOLcat ever made, plus compilations of several million lame jokes. They'll be trying to extract meaningful information from that lot for weeks!
I dunno, has anyone ever died from having an Internet dropped on them?
That explains why the most common phrase in tech support is "YOU again?!"
Does it mean having the software physically on the premises? Use it for foundations. Does it mean having a certain number of hard disks with Windows on them as the OS? Dumpster diving, ebay, and the old janitor's closet can take care of that. Does it mean having the copy of Windows within a certain distance from the students? Under the floorboards counts, right?
Are they mandating that the students be forced to sit and use a Windows machine for a certain amount of time per day? Are they mandating what the student-facing interface has to look like?
It seems that for any condition set, there would be a way to get around it. Lawyers at dawn and all that.
In fact, forget the eyeballs!
Fix the political system - make America an actual democracy and tilt the playing field in favor of third parties. Review the entire national budget and remove all the bits which boil down to chest-beating, pissing other countries off and underwriting bad industry. Used the money saved to pay America's bills, fix the education system, and provide better health care than Canada. Take corporate focus off pure moneymaking. Promote greater social interaction between neighbors.
Make America great again. Support innovation. Get America back into the top ten countries in the world for freedom of the populace and rational thought. Declare all religion to be a form of adult-only entertainment subject to the same taxes and restrictions on exposing minors to it. Drop the national borders completely and work something out with Mexico so people will want to live there just as much as in the US. Get some solid data on whether decriminalizing drugs altogether would cut down on violence and organized crime, and then follow the recommendations. Tell the states that unless they cut their gun death numbers by 90%, Measures Will Be Taken and they will only apply to those states.
Investigate every office-holding politician of the last ten years - it'll give the FBI something to chew on and they can hire the staff the CIA and military won't be able to afford any more. Disallow legal person rights to corporations. Fix the social security system so people aren't starving to death in disease-ridden slums any more.
Beef up public transport. Replace tariffs on high-fuel-efficiency imported cars with a subsidy. Tell local car manufacturers that if they can build something that meets the new standards, they get a subsidy too. As the efficiency of the average car on the road goes up, decrease the subsidies. Have them drop off entirely after ten years anyway. Ideally, make the calculation based on total running/repair costs of a vehicle so you don't end up with cars that run on a teaspoon of fuel but crap their parts out every ten miles.
Give people four years to stew about the changes. If, in the unlikely event that you're not assassinated, impeached on trumped-up charges or drummed out of office by multibilliondollar industries hurting badly, and in the REALLY unlikely event that you're re-elected under the new voting system, start fixing all the other things that need doing but no-one wants to touch politically. Like converting the US to metric.
Of course, I will expect to be compensated appropriately. But it's their decision. However, I have learned how to put the situation into business-speak so they can learn in ten minutes precisely how screwed they are and how badly they need to unclench their wallet muscles.
Oddly enough, I've never been told that if I don't like it, I can quit. Generally because I've already said things like "You're completely boned, and you know it. You need me and my skillset desperately. I've given you a list of things you need to fix in order to keep me here. That includes an N% pay rise (with N being anything up to and over three figures, depending). I already have five other employers fighting over who gets me at the end of this contract - you're welcome to start bidding at the figure I've given you. If you can't approve that, you're welcome to pass it up the chain for approval."
Often management they won't get their act into gear in time, or will offer measly 20-30% increases, or try and negotiate. In which case I just move on to the next job, and the next, and the next.
One place managed to hold on to me for seven years simply by being an awesome place to work. In the end, they canned the few managers who made the place actually work and I'd already maxed out their promotion ladder, so I moved on (I was the last senior tech to do so - call me sentimental).
Strangely enough, bosses at new employers aren't used to a tech who tells them exactly where they stand. Fortunately, although there are many problems in the world, this particular one isn't mine.
And it was a good thing, too, because we could prove what we were or were not doing while we were on the clock and the taxpayer's dollar.
If members of the public had wanted to tape me (audio or video) during work hours, that would have been A-OK with me - we had our own cameras so there would be no point in them screwing with the editing, and if they wanted evidence that I was doing my job, they could have it. (Of course, there would probably be privacy issues to address if I was working on someone's file, but the principle is sound.)