That would be a godsend...back in the old days it was no big deal to swallow the little strip of paper with a 5 character passcode on it, but have you seen the keys these days? The really important stuff is encoded with MEGABYTE encryption keys...we're losing agents to ink poisoning! The horror...the horror...
Hmm. The internet being a free society and all, I'd imagine that open cyberwar would be met in the simplest way: internet blockade. All the pipes just ignore anything from whoever is attacking. Then the only way a country could attack would be to physically get into another country and launch from there...which would be an act of cyberwar against that second country too.
Of course, that's just the condescending slap-on-the-wrist version. More likely it'd start raining bombs over the attacking country. There is not one country on Earth that would sit back and let another country directly damage its infrastructure; that's almost as infuriating as a physical invasion, doing damage on the country's own home soil. It's as much of a commitment to hostilities as a real invasion, too; no political propaganda would save the aggresor from being universally condemned by the rest of the world.
So this is about as dangerous as nuclear weapons. Incredibly dangerous, and yet everyone will be afraid to fire first, because the response volley will be fatal.
Well, international treaties state that no country can own territory in space (this is a gross summary of the law, and unfortunately I can't find the text of it...but if you happen to have a copy of Larry Niven's "N-Space" it a much better summary is in there somewhere). By extension of that law, it follows that no organizations or citizens can own territory in space either. Too easy to cheat that way; a person or organization could acquire property, then let their country use the property anyway. Or some such thing like that. It'd be too easy to abuse, and would spoil the point of the treaty (mainly it was to stop anyone from launching nukes from there, but there are other reasons just as important). Even if it WAS legal to own property in space, wouldn't you have to follow common rules anyway? I doubt any of the sellers (or buyers) involved here have physically gone there and planted their flag to make a claim, eh? =)
evilWurst ...however, I *DO* have a nice villa reserved on the bloodriver. You don't want to know what it cost me...
Well...if it is possible to tell WHERE the mouse is being touched instead of if it is, as a whole, being touched...no more mouse buttons needed, perhaps not even a scroll wheel. Fewer pieces to get crudded up in the middle of that Quake match:) Or imagine if you could actually map buttons to any point on the top/front of the mouse. Hell, imagine a keyboard that could do this. We'd have interfaces that could be remapped on the fly, kinda like in Star Trek TNG. - evilWurst, an idle dreamer
A theory I once heard on population growth/implosion that stuck with me was the following: in a poor country you have lots of children because most of them are going to die. As a country becomes more advanced, the child death rate drops quickly, and over generations people start having less children. You have population booms that parallel times of prosperity, when medicine advances faster than the must-have-lots-of-kids mentality is changing. It's a reasonable theory, and I can see how the UN was thinking along similar lines. The problem with basing a study on this reasoning is that it might take a hundred years for a society to shift to a balanced "1.5 kids per couple" (or whatever a balanced rate would be). Lets see here...a billion in China and it's area, a billion in India, a billion in Africa...all of which are just starting to get the good medical science, but who have had centuries without it. The "civilized" world is slowing its growth, but even now that's only a quarter of the world's population at best. So yes, it looks like some day the population will stabilize. Also looks like it won't be any day in our immediate future. I'm much more inclined to trust the predictions that just follow the overall trend, for our lifetime...the stabilization will be a little after. On a side note, I'm seeing some idealist thoughts here along the lines of "humans should control their population like nature does." My opinion of this is...well, I'm reminded of the first time I saw The Matrix. Remember the scene where the Agent is sharing his thoughts with the captive Morpheus about humanity being a virus, growing and spreading uncontrolled everywhere? He implied that humanity was freakishly unnatural in that sense. I thought, "hmm...what about deer? Rats? Trees? Grass? Bacteria?" All life behaves that way. Perhaps instead of mistakenly arguing that we preserve ourselves by being more like the animals, we should be striving to succeed where they always fail. -evilWurst
Ah, but it's not quite THAT bad. If the subject was of child bearing/siring age (I don't know if it's male or female), then you've probably got a generous ammount of sperm or eggs to work with, which, if I'm remembering my high school biology correctly, already have some variance from the parent built in. Plus this genetic material is better protected than that of the other cells. Plus if the subject is female, you eliminate the (IMHO pointless) debate about mitochondria, because you can use hers directly. And as for keepinng the population stable, well, you can keep infusing "fresh" clones into the population for as long as you want, which would tend to at least keep the population true to its starting point. And if you didn't breed the 'failures' back into the pool, the population would eventually stabilize over many generations. That aside, it's still a massive undertaking, and any race bred from one subject will not be completely true to the original population. But its not as hard as it might seem at first glance. The real question is, as always, what purpose does this serve? What the hell are we gonna do with a bunch of Wooly Mammoths with no real native habitat? Will this accomplish anything besides 1) proving it can be done 2) having some live ones to study 3) adding cool new creatures to the local zoo? -evilWurst
That crazy guy was right, the particle accelerator really did release a small black hole! Even as we speak it's sitting in the Earth's core slowly absorbing matter, causing the Earth's crust to gradually settle, casuing all these 6.0 and worse earthquakes! I only hope we don't run out of plywood and old tires before we finish building the spaceship! just kidding
An excellent point. Also, not all of us here at slashdot have been here long enough to know everything about every subject yet;) And even on an issue you may feel you aleady know pretty well, seeing a few hundred different perspectives on it will no doubt cause you to think about it a little differently, learn more, etc. Which is, after all, the point.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be a godsend...back in the old days it was no big deal to swallow the little strip of paper with a 5 character passcode on it, but have you seen the keys these days? The really important stuff is encoded with MEGABYTE encryption keys...we're losing agents to ink poisoning!
The horror...the horror...
-evilWurst
Hmm. The internet being a free society and all, I'd imagine that open cyberwar would be met in the simplest way: internet blockade. All the pipes just ignore anything from whoever is attacking. Then the only way a country could attack would be to physically get into another country and launch from there...which would be an act of cyberwar against that second country too.
Of course, that's just the condescending slap-on-the-wrist version. More likely it'd start raining bombs over the attacking country. There is not one country on Earth that would sit back and let another country directly damage its infrastructure; that's almost as infuriating as a physical invasion, doing damage on the country's own home soil. It's as much of a commitment to hostilities as a real invasion, too; no political propaganda would save the aggresor from being universally condemned by the rest of the world.
So this is about as dangerous as nuclear weapons. Incredibly dangerous, and yet everyone will be afraid to fire first, because the response volley will be fatal.
-evilWurst
Well, international treaties state that no country can own territory in space (this is a gross summary of the law, and unfortunately I can't find the text of it...but if you happen to have a copy of Larry Niven's "N-Space" it a much better summary is in there somewhere).
...however, I *DO* have a nice villa reserved on the bloodriver. You don't want to know what it cost me...
By extension of that law, it follows that no organizations or citizens can own territory in space either. Too easy to cheat that way; a person or organization could acquire property, then let their country use the property anyway. Or some such thing like that. It'd be too easy to abuse, and would spoil the point of the treaty (mainly it was to stop anyone from launching nukes from there, but there are other reasons just as important).
Even if it WAS legal to own property in space, wouldn't you have to follow common rules anyway? I doubt any of the sellers (or buyers) involved here have physically gone there and planted their flag to make a claim, eh? =)
evilWurst
Well...if it is possible to tell WHERE the mouse is being touched instead of if it is, as a whole, being touched...no more mouse buttons needed, perhaps not even a scroll wheel. Fewer pieces to get crudded up in the middle of that Quake match :) Or imagine if you could actually map buttons to any point on the top/front of the mouse. Hell, imagine a keyboard that could do this. We'd have interfaces that could be remapped on the fly, kinda like in Star Trek TNG. - evilWurst, an idle dreamer
A theory I once heard on population growth/implosion that stuck with me was the following: in a poor country you have lots of children because most of them are going to die. As a country becomes more advanced, the child death rate drops quickly, and over generations people start having less children. You have population booms that parallel times of prosperity, when medicine advances faster than the must-have-lots-of-kids mentality is changing. It's a reasonable theory, and I can see how the UN was thinking along similar lines. The problem with basing a study on this reasoning is that it might take a hundred years for a society to shift to a balanced "1.5 kids per couple" (or whatever a balanced rate would be). Lets see here...a billion in China and it's area, a billion in India, a billion in Africa...all of which are just starting to get the good medical science, but who have had centuries without it. The "civilized" world is slowing its growth, but even now that's only a quarter of the world's population at best. So yes, it looks like some day the population will stabilize. Also looks like it won't be any day in our immediate future. I'm much more inclined to trust the predictions that just follow the overall trend, for our lifetime...the stabilization will be a little after. On a side note, I'm seeing some idealist thoughts here along the lines of "humans should control their population like nature does." My opinion of this is...well, I'm reminded of the first time I saw The Matrix. Remember the scene where the Agent is sharing his thoughts with the captive Morpheus about humanity being a virus, growing and spreading uncontrolled everywhere? He implied that humanity was freakishly unnatural in that sense. I thought, "hmm...what about deer? Rats? Trees? Grass? Bacteria?" All life behaves that way. Perhaps instead of mistakenly arguing that we preserve ourselves by being more like the animals, we should be striving to succeed where they always fail. -evilWurst
Ah, but it's not quite THAT bad. If the subject was of child bearing/siring age (I don't know if it's male or female), then you've probably got a generous ammount of sperm or eggs to work with, which, if I'm remembering my high school biology correctly, already have some variance from the parent built in. Plus this genetic material is better protected than that of the other cells. Plus if the subject is female, you eliminate the (IMHO pointless) debate about mitochondria, because you can use hers directly. And as for keepinng the population stable, well, you can keep infusing "fresh" clones into the population for as long as you want, which would tend to at least keep the population true to its starting point. And if you didn't breed the 'failures' back into the pool, the population would eventually stabilize over many generations. That aside, it's still a massive undertaking, and any race bred from one subject will not be completely true to the original population. But its not as hard as it might seem at first glance. The real question is, as always, what purpose does this serve? What the hell are we gonna do with a bunch of Wooly Mammoths with no real native habitat? Will this accomplish anything besides 1) proving it can be done 2) having some live ones to study 3) adding cool new creatures to the local zoo? -evilWurst
That crazy guy was right, the particle accelerator really did release a small black hole! Even as we speak it's sitting in the Earth's core slowly absorbing matter, causing the Earth's crust to gradually settle, casuing all these 6.0 and worse earthquakes! I only hope we don't run out of plywood and old tires before we finish building the spaceship! just kidding
An excellent point. Also, not all of us here at slashdot have been here long enough to know everything about every subject yet ;) And even on an issue you may feel you aleady know pretty well, seeing a few hundred different perspectives on it will no doubt cause you to think about it a little differently, learn more, etc. Which is, after all, the point.