Ben Reytblat has some useful (and I assume accurate, though I can’t vouch) info in comments at this previous post today: Continue reading That Orbital 3-D Printer
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Spartacus Project
So, now that we know that they’re watching our web visits, web sites, social networks and email, and having seen what the IRS (and other agencies) have been willing to do against what they perceive to be enemies of the state, it might be time to start monkey wrenching them. While it was only a movie, I think we might take a page from the example of the Roman slave revolt.
Imagine if we were to flood the Internet with terms like “Tea Party,” “Benghazi,” “IRS abuse,” etc., to the point at which they’d have so many false leads that it would make it harder for them to track the people who are actually discussing such things? It can’t just be a standard list of the keywords/phrases — that would be easy to spot as a pattern. One could randomly shuffle them around, but that would still be easily detectable. Even generating random subsets of them wouldn’t do the job. What we need is an “enemy of the state” pattern generator, that would throw in a subset of the keywords/phrases, interspersed with a bunch of random English words to make it look to a machine as though they are being discussed in some kind of context, and no two messages alike. I’m imagining a perl (or python, or whatever) script, or whatever. The output might be spammed (OK, that’s the part I don’t like, but I’m not sure how to spread it to enough IPs otherwise — I’m open to alternative suggestions) to the world, and flood the zone to the point that they won’t be able to tell wheat from chaff. We can all be Spartacus, even those of us who had no intention to.
Thoughts?
[Update a couple minutes later]
It’s worth reading the comments at that old blog post, if you haven’t. Particularly this one on how to recognize the end of a Republic.
Gardening The Universe
A few weeks ago, I was invited to a gathering to hear the latest from Howard Bloom in downtown LA, but I had a conflict. But David Swindle attended, and has a report. (I did talk to Howard briefly a few days later, in San Diego.)
This –>
It became apparent again that I was the odd man out in the room. Most of the questions were phrased in explicitly secular terms.
Afterwards as Howard and a group of us sat around discussing, I raised my objection to the soulless, materialist focus. I drew a parallel between the groups who had sought to explore and settle the North American continent in the 1600s and those who should now seek to place their mark on the Moon, Mars, and the earth’s orbit.
I reminded Howard and the others that people came to the New World for varying reasons — capitalists eager to make money, the Crown eager to maintain power (primordial corporatists), science-minded explorers eager to discover what was out there, and one group unrepresented at the talk tonight, save for yours truly: the fanatical religious radicals wanting to live free of persecution as they built a godly, happy, counterculture community. It was this mix together that enabled the American experiment to begin and succeed.
People of faith — whether they interpret the Bible through Jewish, Christian, or mystic lenses — are called by God to transcend nature and rise upwards. The earth is not holy; it’s not our mother. As I’ve blogged about before, inspired by Glenn Reynolds’s An Army of Davids, the earth is just a rocky death trap. We can grow a better one ourselves.
To the degree that I have a religion, that’s pretty much it.
A 3-D Printer
…that has been demonstrated to work in weightlessness.
This could significantly reduce O&M costs at the ISS (and later, at private orbital facilities). It could also revolutionize the pace of research, if someone on the ground could send up the specs for new experiment hardware without having to wait weeks or months for a launch.
An Internet War
Has the US started one?
More than passively eavesdropping, we’re penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We’re creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be “fired” against some piece of another country’s electronic infrastructure on a moment’s notice.
This is much worse than what we’re accusing China of doing to us. We’re pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren’t making the Internet any safer. We’re reacting from fear, and causing other countries to counter-react from fear. We’re ignoring resilience in favor of offense.
This may end badly.
Data Disaster
OK, it’s not a total data disaster, but basically, it potentially means the loss of almost all my outgoing email for the past three years or so.
When I migrated to Fedora 19 over the weekend, I did it on a new disk, retaining the old installation on the old one. After I did so, I copied my old files over to the new disk from it. Unfortunately, rather than doing it from the shell with a ‘cp -r *’ I just used the GUI tool to drag’n’drop. Which means that I didn’t get the hidden files. Which contain all of my Thunderbird folders. I still have all incoming mail, because I’m using IMAP, but the outgoing was in those folders.
It shouldn’t have been a problem, but when I went back to grab the rest, I’m getting an error message that the drive can’t be mounted, and warnings that the drive is failing. Is the data still recoverable? And if so, by me, or do I have to take it to a specialist?
The President’s Auto Insurance
One of the most amusingly stupid categories of spam I get is emails about how “Congress passed a bill” or “The president signed a law” resulting in lower auto insurance or (as they often idiotically say) “driving” rates. They sometimes try to tie it into current events. Here are two nutty subject lines today:
“President’s G8 Summit Meeting Yields Lower Auto Ins. For All,”
and
“Following meet with Putin, President announces lower auto ins. for all.”
Sadly, there are enough idiots out there that this probably does work. Until we come up with some cost for emailing, spam will persist.
Molecular Manufacturing And Space
There’s a review of Eric Drexler’s new book
I don’t agree with this (I assume that it’s his own opinion, not Eric’s):
APM will also make space colonization imperative, but for different reasons than for Eric Drexler’s original quest to find a solution to the impending global crisis posed by The Limits to Growth. What will the millions of people now involved in mining, manufacturing, distribution, retailing, transportation, and other services do if much less of these services will be required and most of them could be performed by robots? How will people earn a living if they can buy a desktop factory—something like a super 3D printer—and can produce most of what they need at home and no longer need to shop at Wal-Mart or Amazon? If people aren’t working and earning a good income they will no longer be able to buy stuff. Henry Ford recognized the problem and chose to pay his people well so that they could afford to buy his cars. By choosing to industrialize the Moon and colonize space, thousands and ultimately millions can be put to work earning a good income.
I think that this technology will enable space settlement, but I don’t see how in itself space settlement creates jobs, particularly for those who are becoming unemployable because they’re on the wrong side of the bell curve. That’s a big problem coming down the pike, and space isn’t a solution to it.
Space Operas
What classic SF novel would you like to see on the big screen?
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress would be timely.
XFCE
Is there a doctor in the house? I decided to just go to Fedora 19 beta, since it’s going to be released in a few days anyway. It’s fine so far, except I’m running XFCE, and it refuses to give me a monitor size any larger than 1280×1040, so I’m losing about an inch on all sides with my 21″ LG.
I’ve changed the configuration in the settings editor to 1600×900, and the same in the display.xml file. But when I log out and back in again, it resets them to 1280×1040. I can’t find where in the system it’s getting this information, despite lots of grepping (is it misreading the signal from the monitor?), but it’s driving me nuts. And there doesn’t seem to be a configuration file for X any more.
Any ideas?
[Update a couple minutes later]
OK, it’s probably getting it from xrandr:
[simberg@linux-station ~]$ xrandr
xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default
Screen 0: minimum 640 x 480, current 1280 x 1024, maximum 1280 x 1024
default connected 1280×1024+0+0 0mm x 0mm
1280×1024 0.0*
1280×720 0.0
1024×768 0.0
800×600 0.0
640×480 0.0
So how do I force a change?
[Late evening update]
Yes, the problem is likely some driver or new version of X or something inf F19 foxtrotting things up, because Fedora 18 recognized my monitor no problem. Just not sure what to do about it.
[Sunday morning update]
OK, I installed the latest Nvidia drivers from RPMFusion, and all is now well. It’s a beautiful screen, in fact.