I like "gonggongqichi" (bus). Just saying that word makes me laugh. "Oat" cracks me up too, but that's English.
I didn't know qi was steam though ( I only know a VERY little Chinese ) I guess that's how some people still call a refrigerator an Icebox even though there' no cube of ice at the top that must be replaced these days. Although Icebox is waning.
When a black person calls another black person a Nigga it's obvious to any non-blacks in the room that they aren't welcome to play. But if a Jew starts slinging antisemetic phrases around it's not that obvious to anyone who is a Jew and who is a non-Jew usually. It opens up endless Andy Kaufmannesque possibilities creating chaos someone like Bobby Fischer might be able to take advantage of strategically.
Someone with the ability to play chess at top level obviously has certain mental powers that mean his actions have to be examined VERY closely before pronouncing them insane. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic etc..
Not that I know much about Bobby Fischer. Is he even alive? All signs point to the probability that he is/was nuttier than a fruitcake. Still, I'd have to know alot more about him to be sure.
I dunno about the government, but yes, open systems are good while closed ones are bad. That's because closed systems lead to monopolies which bring innovation to a standstill while extracting more money than their software is worth. ( in other words, for less than the money they extract a better alternative could be made available, but nobody will use it because it can't be interoperable with the existing infrastructure since the owners of the monopoly won't open their closed data formats. )
Rather than the government having to break up a health care software monopoly some years down the road due to antitrust, the more enlightened approach is to try and influence the development of that industry in ways that will keep it open. Openness breeds competition, which in the long run is good for everyone. Sure, there may be some great products on the market now which are closed, but once they get a stranglehold on the potential users of such software, the software will cease improving in any way that benefits users, and the price will go up.
Sanctions? That will never work. Likely Joe user has an incling that if they lose sensitive data that gets used to hurt the company in a public way will get them canned if there has been any breach of company security policy. Canned is the death penalty sanction of the work world.
Security must not overly inconvenience the user or the user will do what they can to get around it. If it's not inconvenient, then the user will see the security as an asset to them personally, and work to make it effective. There has to be a compromise between effectiveness and convenience. It's better to get 95% of the security possible than to reach for 99.999% of the security that could be had and end up with zero percent security because of fed up users.
Taping the smart card to the laptop is ok as long as there is also a password required. If the password is compromised via phishing or other subterfuge, it won't do any good without the smart card. If the laptop is stolen the smartcard won't do any good without the password. Good password policy will ensure the password is not written down. Good password policy is as follows: Keep the number of passwords a user must memorize to one or two NO MORE ( I'm thinking one that encrypts the hard disk and is never changed ( unless the user chooses to do so ) and one network/everything else password ). Enforce excellent password choice, but don't force the user to change their passwords more than once or twice a year if at all.
When the laptop is reported stolen, the card can be deactivated anyway. That means a criminal would have to learn the user's password for both the hard disk and the network and then steal their laptop with smartcard to be able to use it, which they must do within a short window before the theft is reported. You may as well just grab the employee, stick a gun to their head and force them to type their password in theirself. At some point the badguys CAN break your security if they really want to. If it's national security, then don't let employees take their laptops home at all. Forget thiefs, if it's THAT valuable, then the EMPLOYEE could just take the data, sell it or whatever and then claim it was stolen, moving to Tahiti to enjoy their massive wealth after you fire them. Why do they have access to it in the first place?
You will say wait!, Goats have two horns, so they are Bicorns. That's not what I mean. In general usage bicorn has no meaning.
Google responded with the wikipedia entry for Bicorn:
The bicorn is also known as a cocked hat curve, due to its resemblance to a bicorne. It is a curve with equation: y^2(z^2 - x^2) = (x^2 + 2ay -a^2)^2
The Bicorne by the way, is the sort of hat Napoleon wore.
The point being that in a language ( such as French from which cometh both Unicorn and Bicorne, the pattern of putting Bi in place of Uni doesn't hold to produce a two horned animal called a bicorne. Of course French gets Unicorne from the latin unicornis uni = 1 cornu = horn.
It's good to note that in the google results that in Harry Potter mythology a Bicorn indeed does have two horns however.
Guesses based on the word itself could include a mutant strain of Zea Mays that produces double ears of corn. Offering that, ( or a definition based on the unicorn to bicorn pattern ) would be talking out of one's ass, and not very useful. (That's what I would have done too - not to dispariage anal ranting. ) Other valid ideas might be someone's last name. Names come from all different languages, even ones with no latin connection. For all I know, Bicorn is a common Bantu name. Maybe the World Champion Shufflepuck Champion is named Ebenezer Bicorn. This isn't true, but it could very well be.
I understand where that sort of statement come from. It's what you tell yourself when trying to convince yourself to have all those, no doubt useful attributes, i.e. value your natural talent whatever that may be, develop it, be ambitious, and hard working, but in getting to the bottom of things, this sort of propaganda has to be abandoned as it distorts one's perception of reality as much as defeatist statements, like 'talent doesn't matter, even mine', 'why bother developing it then', 'Why be ambitious, it's a lost cause', and 'If you can't win, why work so hard?'
Where had the risk gone? They didn't know, or didn't ask. One reason was that the outputs came
from "black box" computer models and were hard to subject to a
commonsense smell test. Another was that the quants, who should have been
more aware of the copula's weaknesses, weren't the ones making the big
asset-allocation decisions. Their managers, who made the actual calls,
lacked the math skills to understand what the models were doing or how
they worked. They could, however, understand something as simple as a
single correlation number. That was the problem.
Isn't that how it is anywhere? There are no jobs, where your boss is your boss because they have proven themselves to have superior skills in your job. They may have superior skills in your line of work, but that is different. Fuzzing the topic to 'line of work' or 'profession' sort of puts getting to be the boss into the definition of what makes a good X. It and the money that goes with it, can certainly feature in many definitions of success, but then that would be success measured from the point of view of the individual, not the company. The most productive widget assembler on an assembly line doesn't necessarily get promoted to supervisor. Should they? I don't know. I bet that efficient assembler thinks they should, but then maybe someone who sucks at assembling would serve the company better by doing another job.
Take the above quote and plug in any other skill for the word math, and you have anyone's job.
If the quants had really been in charge, I wonder how long they could have kept this going. Maybe, indefinately. Probably indefinately. The thing is, why should anyone bother to try and keep it going once they're rich? Better to sell it off to some idiots that will fsck it up, and go live on a beach.
I wouldn't hold out much hope for capacitors ever storing energy well enough to replace batteries.
There is one way of storing energy that has been proven, time tested, and will definately work. Hydrocarbons.
The cool thing about hydrocarbons is that they are very energy dense, burn in air which is all around us, and you can pump them into your gas tank and go. You can go for hundreds of miles without refueling, and you get as much power as you want on demand. They're pretty hard to beat for an energy storage mechanism.
It's true that they have been pumpped out of the ground and burnt to release various pollutants into the air. But converting, say biomass from wood into hydrocarbons could be theoretically carbon neutral. You could gas up your existing car on biomass diesel or gasoline, and drive to your hearts content without contributing to global warming. And we're talking very clean impurity free gasoline - much better for your engine and the atmosphere than the stuff from the ground that has been purified just enough that your engine can handle it, but in which lots of nasty stuff is left because it would be too expensive to remove it. Artificial hydrocarbons are clean burning, and particulate free.
If you want to store energy, then hydrocarbons are the way. You can get the carbon out of the air in the form of CO2, if you feel like wasting energy unburning it. But it's even smarter to just use coal out of the ground as the source of carbon. You can take your hippy dippy carbon neutral tree hugging energy and use it to add hydrogen atoms to this coal carbon. By adding a couple of hydrogens to each coal carbon atom, you've doubled the energy that will be released when it's burned without increasing the carbon released into the atmosphere.
Put another way, by injecting clean energy into the energy stream supplied by coal, you've halved the amount of coal that needs to be burned, and altered it's form to the far more useful hydrocarbon form.
And the REALLY cool thing, is that you don't even need CLEAN energy to add hydrogen to coal to make hydrocarbons. Hydrogen can be made with DIRTY energy just as easily as it can be made by solar or wind! You can burn coal to make hydrogen to add to coal to make hydrocarbons. We don't need no stinking Saudi Oil Fields! We got good old American COAL! And believe me - every last nugget will be burned.
That last fact, that every last nugget will be burned means you don't need to feel bad about mixing your rainbow and unicorn encrusted energy with it. You're not saving anything. Every last economically useful fossil fuel will be burned. ESPECIALLY if global warming turns out to exceed even the doom-mongers expectations of disaster. We ESPECIALLY won't be able to afford to stop burning it then. We'll just be too poor. We'll have all we can do to deal with the droughts storms and rising seas. Cheap dirty energy will be vital to maintain civilization.
Today most hippy dippy ultraclean fuels such as biodiesel are used to blend with existing fuels to bring them up to standards for things like sulfur and particulate matter. If it weren't for biodiesel, these fuels would have to be further refined before they could be used.
Hippy dippy schemes to produce hydrogen will be run to feed coal to liquids plants with clean hydrogen which will then be used to turn lignite into diesel and gasoline. This superclean fuel will be more expensive than that pumpped out of the ground, because it's better. It won't reach your gas tank or oil furnace so clean. It will be blended with cheap barely refined sludge to make something that won't kill your car.
How is this new. Obtain beaker, Put some Red Devil Lye and water in there. Then add aluminum. Hook hose to it. Poof, you got hydrogen. This is something kids do to fill hydrogen balloons for pranks. Hardly cutting edge science.
PS, the cool thing about water + lye + aluminum => hydrogen is that it keeps dissolving alumninum and is not consumed in the reaction. It's the water that dissolves the aluminum.
Relative wealth is important, because as resources become scarcer, they relatively poor will no longer be able to afford them. Being relatively wealthy makes you safer. Think about what happened when gas/food prices spiked. In the first world, we didn't go on Sunday Drives anymore. In the third world, they didn't eat two meals a day anymore, just living with the one meal.
On a totally unrelated note, though I didn't see the character, Shanzai translates as 'now' I believe.
Friend to friend is susceptible to infiltration. Why go to all the trouble? There are many p2p darknets out there and many more in the pipes that solve the problem of the fuzz zapping you for making copyrighted material available using a purely technical solution that doesn't affect the user experience. These solutions offer much higher assurance than 'only sharing with your friends' could ever offer.
These darknets work, and suffer only from lack of users. The question is: Why? Answer: There is no need for them.
Huh? You may ask. People are getting sued. How can you say there is no need? You might think: "If enough people get sued then there won't be any more illegal content for me to download!"
Yet there is plenty of illegal content available to download on P2P networks. There are enough idiots, and naive folks, ( and even a constant supply of new ones ) to make copyrighted material available that despite the best efforts to sue them out of existence, they are still there. And you can download copyrighted stuff illegally with impunity as long as you don't share it. The reason is that if they sue you for downloading, you can just say that you own what you downloaded. The cost of getting out of a lawsuit is the cost of whatever the content was on eBay. 'See judge, I already owned this, but I wanted to play it on my MP3 player and I don't know how to translate a CD into MP3 so I just downloaded the MP3. It's not worth their time to send you the notice.
I think some people just don't know how to turn sharing off, or don't understand the increased legal risk of sharing, or like to feel important looking at their server logs and seeing all the people using the service they provide of sharing illegal content. There will always be children and teenagers downloading and sharing music unaware of the trouble they could get their parents in.
So the leachers can leach as it is, and the sharers are largely too naive to understand that they need a safer way to share music. Once one of the newbies wises up, they don't even need to switch networks to continue getting their copyrighted material illegally. They just become leaches. Nobody in the game has any need that can only be satisfied by a darknet. And because the P2P software companies don't really help users hide, nobody can say they built the system to be abused for illegal purposes. If that were the case it would be very simple to add at least some rudimentary security against snoopers.
Any darknet is going to have to offer very good speed, and some compelling feature other than security to take off. People won't switch for security, though they might switch for something only possible with such security.
What features? How about being able to host a distributed website, where you can post anything without fear or reprisal or of having it traced back to you? You post your signature, and it's like your tld.
One can imagine URLs such as: http://localhostport/tims-signature/filename?version=3.0+ that would get any file named 'filename' signed by Tim with version greater than or equal to 3.0. Of course you would design the URL query syntax to support ranges of versions, specific versions etc. You might want the earliest available version with version greater than X, or the latest version, or the latest version greater than X, or whatever.
Current P2P illegal filesharing occurs because the users are naive. But these users aren't PRODUCING any content. They are downloading it and mostly accidentally sharing it, requiring no effort on their part. Someone who produces content on the other hand is not going to be so naive. They are going to have to understand the tool to use it. If they choose to share ( publish ) something, they are going to see dialog boxes that will inform them as to some of the implications. Because they are actively taking an action, they are going to look before they leap.
As a software developer trying to make a living I have to call bullshit.
I make my living largely using open sources software to build stuff for a company. Without the open source software, I'd have to learn some proprietary piece of crap and watch my job devolve into pointing and clicking and 'no we can't do that because the tool doesn't do it'. With open source, I can say absolutely yes we can do that, and then figure out how to do that afterwards in full confidence that even if the tool doesn't exist, I can create it or improve the existing tool to get the job done. That's just not something you can do with closed source.
Abandonment might be a good idea. If the junk up there gets too thick maybe space is just no longer possible without massive shields. It may be already. They thought 1/185 chance of impact was acceptable!!!??? How does the Hubble itself avoid getting shreded in less than a year then unless the junk is mostly on the way to and back from the hubble
If we abandon human spaceflight since the massive shields necessary to do this safely make it uneconomical/impossible given current technology, then we can spend the money on explorative probes and experiments, and maybe even alternative forms ( other than rockets ) of attaining orbit which might have the potential to carry the necessary massive shields.
You know you are right. There is no justice. The Pirate Bay is throwing lots of defenses out there to see what sticks, but among the defenses listed in TFA, one stood out as probably their best:
It was further argued that uploading a torrent does not
mean that the copyrighted files are also `available', since it then has
to be seeded.
There you go. The hash exists prior to any making available. However, they still might get them since the hash might be considered a derivative work. However I don't know how much patience a judge would have with adjusting the claims again to be that they distributed derivative works illegally.
Purposefully setting the computer with the eula screen open and getting your cat to press the button purposefully is the same as pressing the button with your finger or with a pencil. You can't say that signing a contract with a pen means that it's not binding because it was the BIC that actually signed it.
But it might work to push the button with your finger and just lie and say your cat jumpped on your keyboard during the installation process, and that you didn't see any eula. I wonder if they would then try to get you for using their software without a license. If they 'make available' *ducks* their own software, is a license implied? Is it ok to assume that reading a webpage with stories on it from a website the author runs is ok? maybe they didn't intend for anyone to see.. How the heck should I know...
It was a martian. You see about a billion years ago, the Martian civilization discovered the secret of consiousness. Eventually the robots they created displaced them, and then when the planet's resources were depleted, they left for the stars leaving behind some curators. These curators are not really consious, their robotic creators ensured this so that they would be reliable in their task of preserving their martian heritage, but sometimes they do act in ways that are, almost uncannily lifelike.
This was the case here. The Martian curator bots find the rovers interesting, or rather, they find their controllers interesting. They periodically dust the solar panels so that they will be able to keep roving. They are curious as to what they are doing, maybe even appreciative that someone has visited to appreciate what they have devoted the past eon to preserving. For them, watching us look is most gratifying. They really ache to communicate with us and show us all the Martian history in their underground vaults, but because of their programming to remain inconspicuous, they can't. Still, they are helpful when they can be and not give themselves away.
What's special about 115 Gev? If there is something special then why not look there first? One tends to get lucky that way sometimes. If something would be nice and make things work out, often it's there. It gets you your discovery that much sooner rather than having to scan the whole range of values, althought there is something to be said for being thorough since there may be cool surprises you weren't expecting.
There's a scheme for p2p that breaks up files into 128 k chunks such that any particular chunk is nothing but random data without the other chunks AND crucially the same chunk may be and likely is part of a movie a word document, a family photo and any number of legitimate files.
The chunks are distributed about the network, and the pointers are hashes of the data. ( I can't see the site right now because of where my computer is sitting so my recollection of the details may be wrong, I can't check. See the above link for the straight dope. ) Anyway, you basically run a webserver locally that does the p2p retrievals when you visit a link of the form http://localhostsomeport/hashcodeofsomedata Then your locally running webserver gets the needed data, pieces it together and serves it to your web browser.
Nobody can know what the chunks are because they appear to be random data, and nobody can say you downloaded ( or are serving ) something bad because the chunks have legit uses. And instead of some stupid song search client you use your web browser to browse the p2p web. Google could index this p2p web if it wanted to.
The only thing that can put the data chunks into the form of a particular ( possibly naughty ) file is the url pointing to it. And those urls can be in ( for instance ) index.html files on the same p2p web. If you post a p2p link to a copyrighted file on the 'regular web' then sure you might be in trouble, but if you post a link to a p2p page without copyrighted content but which contains links to other p2p pages, and some of those pages then contain links to copyrighted content, then I don't see how you could be in trouble since it's unreasonable for you to be expected to examine the page you link to, all the pages that page links to, and all the pages those pages link to ( i.e. crawl the whole web and examine all the pages ) before posting a link.
Really, I think Madore's p2p scheme is the best thing in p2p today, solving all p2p's current problems except one, namely why should I not leach? Still, I think it could put a real cramp in anyone who wants to censor.
I wonder if you could define a database data structure and run a process that stores the index to the p2p web in that distributed database. Then you could publish the search engine code ( or many different search engines, if the database structure were 'open' ) which would query the database for search results. Then you could cut google right the hell out of the picture. All you would need is one good person to run the web crawler process which keeps the database updated. Hell there might even be some way to have the crawling aspect of things distributed, but that's for a future release.
Something like this really ought to take over. I can't see why it hasn't already.
Guarding articles takes effort which can't be sustained indefinately. The guarder will get tired of polling the article and eventually relent allowing the content to be changed.
A script that looks for changes and puts it back when some are found would be detected and the account terminated or IP banned. Guarding articles requries a human, and a human will stop caring, or will at worst care only about a few articles.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know qi was steam though ( I only know a VERY little Chinese ) I guess that's how some people still call a refrigerator an Icebox even though there' no cube of ice at the top that must be replaced these days. Although Icebox is waning.
Someone with the ability to play chess at top level obviously has certain mental powers that mean his actions have to be examined VERY closely before pronouncing them insane. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic etc..
Not that I know much about Bobby Fischer. Is he even alive? All signs point to the probability that he is/was nuttier than a fruitcake. Still, I'd have to know alot more about him to be sure.
Rather than the government having to break up a health care software monopoly some years down the road due to antitrust, the more enlightened approach is to try and influence the development of that industry in ways that will keep it open. Openness breeds competition, which in the long run is good for everyone. Sure, there may be some great products on the market now which are closed, but once they get a stranglehold on the potential users of such software, the software will cease improving in any way that benefits users, and the price will go up.
Sanctions? That will never work. Likely Joe user has an incling that if they lose sensitive data that gets used to hurt the company in a public way will get them canned if there has been any breach of company security policy. Canned is the death penalty sanction of the work world.
Security must not overly inconvenience the user or the user will do what they can to get around it. If it's not inconvenient, then the user will see the security as an asset to them personally, and work to make it effective. There has to be a compromise between effectiveness and convenience. It's better to get 95% of the security possible than to reach for 99.999% of the security that could be had and end up with zero percent security because of fed up users.
Taping the smart card to the laptop is ok as long as there is also a password required. If the password is compromised via phishing or other subterfuge, it won't do any good without the smart card. If the laptop is stolen the smartcard won't do any good without the password. Good password policy will ensure the password is not written down. Good password policy is as follows: Keep the number of passwords a user must memorize to one or two NO MORE ( I'm thinking one that encrypts the hard disk and is never changed ( unless the user chooses to do so ) and one network/everything else password ). Enforce excellent password choice, but don't force the user to change their passwords more than once or twice a year if at all.
When the laptop is reported stolen, the card can be deactivated anyway. That means a criminal would have to learn the user's password for both the hard disk and the network and then steal their laptop with smartcard to be able to use it, which they must do within a short window before the theft is reported. You may as well just grab the employee, stick a gun to their head and force them to type their password in theirself. At some point the badguys CAN break your security if they really want to. If it's national security, then don't let employees take their laptops home at all. Forget thiefs, if it's THAT valuable, then the EMPLOYEE could just take the data, sell it or whatever and then claim it was stolen, moving to Tahiti to enjoy their massive wealth after you fire them. Why do they have access to it in the first place?
<disclaimer>I have not read TFA, only the title.</disclaimer>
<humor>
Think of the implications if marketing is patented... LESS MARKETING, at least for a while. I, for one, like it.
</humor>
You will say wait!, Goats have two horns, so they are Bicorns. That's not what I mean. In general usage bicorn has no meaning.
Google responded with the wikipedia entry for Bicorn:
I understand where that sort of statement come from. It's what you tell yourself when trying to convince yourself to have all those, no doubt useful attributes, i.e. value your natural talent whatever that may be, develop it, be ambitious, and hard working, but in getting to the bottom of things, this sort of propaganda has to be abandoned as it distorts one's perception of reality as much as defeatist statements, like 'talent doesn't matter, even mine', 'why bother developing it then', 'Why be ambitious, it's a lost cause', and 'If you can't win, why work so hard?'
And those in charge, don't and won't ever.
From TFA:
Isn't that how it is anywhere? There are no jobs, where your boss is your boss because they have proven themselves to have superior skills in your job. They may have superior skills in your line of work, but that is different. Fuzzing the topic to 'line of work' or 'profession' sort of puts getting to be the boss into the definition of what makes a good X. It and the money that goes with it, can certainly feature in many definitions of success, but then that would be success measured from the point of view of the individual, not the company. The most productive widget assembler on an assembly line doesn't necessarily get promoted to supervisor. Should they? I don't know. I bet that efficient assembler thinks they should, but then maybe someone who sucks at assembling would serve the company better by doing another job.
Take the above quote and plug in any other skill for the word math, and you have anyone's job.
If the quants had really been in charge, I wonder how long they could have kept this going. Maybe, indefinately. Probably indefinately. The thing is, why should anyone bother to try and keep it going once they're rich? Better to sell it off to some idiots that will fsck it up, and go live on a beach.
I wouldn't hold out much hope for capacitors ever storing energy well enough to replace batteries.
There is one way of storing energy that has been proven, time tested, and will definately work. Hydrocarbons.
The cool thing about hydrocarbons is that they are very energy dense, burn in air which is all around us, and you can pump them into your gas tank and go. You can go for hundreds of miles without refueling, and you get as much power as you want on demand. They're pretty hard to beat for an energy storage mechanism.
It's true that they have been pumpped out of the ground and burnt to release various pollutants into the air. But converting, say biomass from wood into hydrocarbons could be theoretically carbon neutral. You could gas up your existing car on biomass diesel or gasoline, and drive to your hearts content without contributing to global warming. And we're talking very clean impurity free gasoline - much better for your engine and the atmosphere than the stuff from the ground that has been purified just enough that your engine can handle it, but in which lots of nasty stuff is left because it would be too expensive to remove it. Artificial hydrocarbons are clean burning, and particulate free.
If you want to store energy, then hydrocarbons are the way. You can get the carbon out of the air in the form of CO2, if you feel like wasting energy unburning it. But it's even smarter to just use coal out of the ground as the source of carbon. You can take your hippy dippy carbon neutral tree hugging energy and use it to add hydrogen atoms to this coal carbon. By adding a couple of hydrogens to each coal carbon atom, you've doubled the energy that will be released when it's burned without increasing the carbon released into the atmosphere.
Put another way, by injecting clean energy into the energy stream supplied by coal, you've halved the amount of coal that needs to be burned, and altered it's form to the far more useful hydrocarbon form.
And the REALLY cool thing, is that you don't even need CLEAN energy to add hydrogen to coal to make hydrocarbons. Hydrogen can be made with DIRTY energy just as easily as it can be made by solar or wind! You can burn coal to make hydrogen to add to coal to make hydrocarbons. We don't need no stinking Saudi Oil Fields! We got good old American COAL! And believe me - every last nugget will be burned.
That last fact, that every last nugget will be burned means you don't need to feel bad about mixing your rainbow and unicorn encrusted energy with it. You're not saving anything. Every last economically useful fossil fuel will be burned. ESPECIALLY if global warming turns out to exceed even the doom-mongers expectations of disaster. We ESPECIALLY won't be able to afford to stop burning it then. We'll just be too poor. We'll have all we can do to deal with the droughts storms and rising seas. Cheap dirty energy will be vital to maintain civilization.
Today most hippy dippy ultraclean fuels such as biodiesel are used to blend with existing fuels to bring them up to standards for things like sulfur and particulate matter. If it weren't for biodiesel, these fuels would have to be further refined before they could be used.
Hippy dippy schemes to produce hydrogen will be run to feed coal to liquids plants with clean hydrogen which will then be used to turn lignite into diesel and gasoline. This superclean fuel will be more expensive than that pumpped out of the ground, because it's better. It won't reach your gas tank or oil furnace so clean. It will be blended with cheap barely refined sludge to make something that won't kill your car.
How is this new. Obtain beaker, Put some Red Devil Lye and water in there. Then add aluminum. Hook hose to it. Poof, you got hydrogen. This is something kids do to fill hydrogen balloons for pranks. Hardly cutting edge science.
PS, the cool thing about water + lye + aluminum => hydrogen is that it keeps dissolving alumninum and is not consumed in the reaction. It's the water that dissolves the aluminum.
Relative wealth is important, because as resources become scarcer, they relatively poor will no longer be able to afford them. Being relatively wealthy makes you safer. Think about what happened when gas/food prices spiked. In the first world, we didn't go on Sunday Drives anymore. In the third world, they didn't eat two meals a day anymore, just living with the one meal. On a totally unrelated note, though I didn't see the character, Shanzai translates as 'now' I believe.
Friend to friend is susceptible to infiltration. Why go to all the trouble? There are many p2p darknets out there and many more in the pipes that solve the problem of the fuzz zapping you for making copyrighted material available using a purely technical solution that doesn't affect the user experience. These solutions offer much higher assurance than 'only sharing with your friends' could ever offer.
These darknets work, and suffer only from lack of users. The question is: Why? Answer: There is no need for them.
Huh? You may ask. People are getting sued. How can you say there is no need? You might think: "If enough people get sued then there won't be any more illegal content for me to download!"
Yet there is plenty of illegal content available to download on P2P networks. There are enough idiots, and naive folks, ( and even a constant supply of new ones ) to make copyrighted material available that despite the best efforts to sue them out of existence, they are still there. And you can download copyrighted stuff illegally with impunity as long as you don't share it. The reason is that if they sue you for downloading, you can just say that you own what you downloaded. The cost of getting out of a lawsuit is the cost of whatever the content was on eBay. 'See judge, I already owned this, but I wanted to play it on my MP3 player and I don't know how to translate a CD into MP3 so I just downloaded the MP3. It's not worth their time to send you the notice.
I think some people just don't know how to turn sharing off, or don't understand the increased legal risk of sharing, or like to feel important looking at their server logs and seeing all the people using the service they provide of sharing illegal content. There will always be children and teenagers downloading and sharing music unaware of the trouble they could get their parents in.
So the leachers can leach as it is, and the sharers are largely too naive to understand that they need a safer way to share music. Once one of the newbies wises up, they don't even need to switch networks to continue getting their copyrighted material illegally. They just become leaches. Nobody in the game has any need that can only be satisfied by a darknet. And because the P2P software companies don't really help users hide, nobody can say they built the system to be abused for illegal purposes. If that were the case it would be very simple to add at least some rudimentary security against snoopers.
Any darknet is going to have to offer very good speed, and some compelling feature other than security to take off. People won't switch for security, though they might switch for something only possible with such security.
What features? How about being able to host a distributed website, where you can post anything without fear or reprisal or of having it traced back to you? You post your signature, and it's like your tld.
One can imagine URLs such as: http://localhostport/tims-signature/filename?version=3.0+ that would get any file named 'filename' signed by Tim with version greater than or equal to 3.0. Of course you would design the URL query syntax to support ranges of versions, specific versions etc. You might want the earliest available version with version greater than X, or the latest version, or the latest version greater than X, or whatever.
Current P2P illegal filesharing occurs because the users are naive. But these users aren't PRODUCING any content. They are downloading it and mostly accidentally sharing it, requiring no effort on their part. Someone who produces content on the other hand is not going to be so naive. They are going to have to understand the tool to use it. If they choose to share ( publish ) something, they are going to see dialog boxes that will inform them as to some of the implications. Because they are actively taking an action, they are going to look before they leap.
The current web does a g
That sounded so hot until I read the last bit, and realized your name is Dale Gribble.
They are a waste of human life. They should be taxed as harshly as cigarettes.
I make my living largely using open sources software to build stuff for a company. Without the open source software, I'd have to learn some proprietary piece of crap and watch my job devolve into pointing and clicking and 'no we can't do that because the tool doesn't do it'. With open source, I can say absolutely yes we can do that, and then figure out how to do that afterwards in full confidence that even if the tool doesn't exist, I can create it or improve the existing tool to get the job done. That's just not something you can do with closed source.
Great post.
If we abandon human spaceflight since the massive shields necessary to do this safely make it uneconomical/impossible given current technology, then we can spend the money on explorative probes and experiments, and maybe even alternative forms ( other than rockets ) of attaining orbit which might have the potential to carry the necessary massive shields.
You know you are right. There is no justice. The Pirate Bay is throwing lots of defenses out there to see what sticks, but among the defenses listed in TFA, one stood out as probably their best:
There you go. The hash exists prior to any making available. However, they still might get them since the hash might be considered a derivative work. However I don't know how much patience a judge would have with adjusting the claims again to be that they distributed derivative works illegally.
But it might work to push the button with your finger and just lie and say your cat jumpped on your keyboard during the installation process, and that you didn't see any eula. I wonder if they would then try to get you for using their software without a license. If they 'make available' *ducks* their own software, is a license implied? Is it ok to assume that reading a webpage with stories on it from a website the author runs is ok? maybe they didn't intend for anyone to see.. How the heck should I know...
This was the case here. The Martian curator bots find the rovers interesting, or rather, they find their controllers interesting. They periodically dust the solar panels so that they will be able to keep roving. They are curious as to what they are doing, maybe even appreciative that someone has visited to appreciate what they have devoted the past eon to preserving. For them, watching us look is most gratifying. They really ache to communicate with us and show us all the Martian history in their underground vaults, but because of their programming to remain inconspicuous, they can't. Still, they are helpful when they can be and not give themselves away.
What's special about 115 Gev? If there is something special then why not look there first? One tends to get lucky that way sometimes. If something would be nice and make things work out, often it's there. It gets you your discovery that much sooner rather than having to scan the whole range of values, althought there is something to be said for being thorough since there may be cool surprises you weren't expecting.
There's a scheme for p2p that breaks up files into 128 k chunks such that any particular chunk is nothing but random data without the other chunks AND crucially the same chunk may be and likely is part of a movie a word document, a family photo and any number of legitimate files.
The chunks are distributed about the network, and the pointers are hashes of the data. ( I can't see the site right now because of where my computer is sitting so my recollection of the details may be wrong, I can't check. See the above link for the straight dope. ) Anyway, you basically run a webserver locally that does the p2p retrievals when you visit a link of the form http://localhostsomeport/hashcodeofsomedata Then your locally running webserver gets the needed data, pieces it together and serves it to your web browser.
Nobody can know what the chunks are because they appear to be random data, and nobody can say you downloaded ( or are serving ) something bad because the chunks have legit uses. And instead of some stupid song search client you use your web browser to browse the p2p web. Google could index this p2p web if it wanted to.
The only thing that can put the data chunks into the form of a particular ( possibly naughty ) file is the url pointing to it. And those urls can be in ( for instance ) index.html files on the same p2p web. If you post a p2p link to a copyrighted file on the 'regular web' then sure you might be in trouble, but if you post a link to a p2p page without copyrighted content but which contains links to other p2p pages, and some of those pages then contain links to copyrighted content, then I don't see how you could be in trouble since it's unreasonable for you to be expected to examine the page you link to, all the pages that page links to, and all the pages those pages link to ( i.e. crawl the whole web and examine all the pages ) before posting a link.
Really, I think Madore's p2p scheme is the best thing in p2p today, solving all p2p's current problems except one, namely why should I not leach? Still, I think it could put a real cramp in anyone who wants to censor.
I wonder if you could define a database data structure and run a process that stores the index to the p2p web in that distributed database. Then you could publish the search engine code ( or many different search engines, if the database structure were 'open' ) which would query the database for search results. Then you could cut google right the hell out of the picture. All you would need is one good person to run the web crawler process which keeps the database updated. Hell there might even be some way to have the crawling aspect of things distributed, but that's for a future release.
Something like this really ought to take over. I can't see why it hasn't already.
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Such a system would probably be much more economically efficient at least in a technical sense.
But do we really need to start with a whole new internet to accomplish this or can we just improve and perfect the current one...
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A script that looks for changes and puts it back when some are found would be detected and the account terminated or IP banned. Guarding articles requries a human, and a human will stop caring, or will at worst care only about a few articles.
If they've got a policy of encrypting harddrives that has been enforced, then this shouldn't be a big deal.
Being all hush hush, you think they would, but then again, who the hell knows.