3blake7

The definitions of words change over time through the cultural process, which is often people mis-using words or using them in new ways. Originally, hacker referred to a person who "hacked" which was a program that would sift through text or data and chop it up into smaller pieces, basically a parser. In the old days, people referred to virtual burglars as crackers, as in safe crackers. But the general population and pop media clung to the word hacker, misused it so much that it's definition has basically been changed. The majority wins.

It wouldn't be too difficult to give users a stream presentation to a wiki, with each user have a dashboard that aggregates changes done by people they are following or pages they are watching. Then they could have their own "blog" which is an aggregate of changes they have made or changes/pages they deliberately put on their stream then integrate it into twitter and facebook to recruit new members or send updates to your facebook status. It could be a useful presentation to create like social networks of specialists that only watch pages they are interested in and have that connectivity with other social media. It could encourage more contributors and people being more active in maintaining content. MediaWiki already lets you watch pages but people would be more likely to help maintain if they had a Facebook friend who was say a college professor and the MediaWiki software was automatically posting updates of the wiki page they are watching on their Facebook stream. That college professor would be more likely to have other friends on Facebook who are experts. If the OP wanted to put in the programming time, he could accomplish this using the HybridAuth open-source authentication library that supports most social media sites, then create a MediaWiki extension using it. He would probably have to create a new MediaWiki skin as well to give it the social networking appearance.

The more I think about it, it just seems so impractical even if it was possible. People would have to live on the spacescraper, they would NEVER be able to evacuate for a fire drill. There would have to be like escape pods. The elevator ride to the top would take 6 hours. The star trams being pretty much vertical would need boosters to reach 8 km/s in the right vector. 660 million people living in there.. Not to mention all the other problems, like hurricanes or the 200 mph winds at higher altitudes, the actual construction and repair. It might be possible but I don't think it would ever be practical enough to be done at any point in the future. I decided just to build a bunch of StarTrams in Antarctica since there is room for them, being 1900 km long and all. I don't know, I think this should be under Speculation if someone wants to move it.

Check out NewEgg.com they have good reviews and ratings on PC components. You might want to dial back the CPU and get a FASTER harddrive, that could easily become your biggest bottle neck.

https://hackeracademy.com and http://hackingdojo.com/ came up in internet search. I was trying to find one a saw awhile back, where it was like a game and they had like a shooting range with websites and stuff they setup that you could practice on. They would restore everything from backups like every 24 hours. You should check out the competition.

The founders and developers of Wikipedia also offer their software as a free and open-source solution developed by programmers all around the world. There are lots of extensions, addons to the MediaWiki software. The Wikipedia team is currently working on better Discussion pages with an extension called Flow and also on notifications (like Facebook) called Echo. They also have a new WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor called VisualEditor that they are developing to make it more user-friendly for people to add content without needing to know the MediaWiki syntax. One of their addons is called Semantic MediaWiki which adds a semantic reasoner and Boolean searching capabilities. Wikipedia doesn't use it though. Since most of the content under Wikipedia is CC-BY copyright, you could just setup your own copy of MediaWiki, copy their ENTIRE site, legally, then build extensions for it to connect to social media like Facebook and Twitter (some already exist but they are of poor quality).

I would make sure you don't have a server administrator that would be royally pissed if you installed a bunch of stuff on his server lol. After that check to see what's already installed and being used so you don't complicate your server environment with a bunch of different servers. What operating system is it? Are you using Active Directory and Windows Server? If so you already have a webserver called IIS and ASP is already installed. Is it Linux? More information would be helpful, I can give you the commands to run to check to see if anything is already installed.

Take a look at "semantic reasoning" it's the thing that interprets text, finds synonyms and antonyms and attempts to deduce entire meanings of sentences and paragraphs. It has to have the ability to do more than just a text match, it has to be able to do a meaning match. Most modern search engines do more than just meaning matches, they also rank on other criteria like the credibility of the source. You might find a problem there worth looking into, how do you determine if a source is more credible than another source? Just because it has more references on other sites does not necessarily make it more credible. I am not intimately familiar with search engine methodologies so I can't offer you more. Perhaps a solution would be a methodology that does angle extrapolation and ranks sources higher if they cover more angles?

Blender has a steep learning curve but it's the best free thing out there. Just learn all the hot keys. You can also take a scroll through this, you might find something nice and more to your liking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2D_animation_software

Mostly the purpose of hacking IS NOT to steal information. Mostly the purpose it to find vulnerable websites and personal computers and infect them with programs that place advertisements. Like 99% of hacking is done by completely automated scripts that search for known vulnerabilities and place advertisements on the computer or website server. Other than that, young people like to sharpen their skills, as a form of sport but mostly they grow out of that and become network security administrators. Hacking a government is just the riskiest thing to do so it's more a testament of skill and confidence in your abilities. The government like any organization is filled with people who don't understand computer security and make mistakes. There is only so much their security experts can do without making it too inconvenient for their employees. Plus, there is always some employee who wants to take his work laptop home and pirate some software infected with a trojan. Stealing credit card numbers, World of Warcraft passwords is also fairly common but from my experience in the IT industry, an overwhelming amount of hacking is done by shady internet advertisers and their shadier re-sellers. A very common attack awhile back was SQL injections, which was a vulnerability in a website software that did not block characters in passwords and usernames, like ; they were able to create a script that would go to random websites and enter SQL code into their username and password prompts. On the back end the variable for the username and password would be replaced with the SQL code, within a database query. This would allow hackers to run their own queries on the database. Most often they would inject JavaScript code into all the rows and columns of the database table. Sometimes they would steal information like passwords and hack all the users emails to give themselves other potential targets. The JavaScript code would link to a site that had a popup, like "Your computer is infected! Download this free virus scanner.." Which would often install adware and malware on your computer. Every time you see an ad they get a penny or something. It could also install a keylogger and record your passwords and credit card numbers. Another motive would be information for identity theft. There is also hacktivism, which are mostly just people injecting personal computers and building a botnet. A botnet is just a big group of compromised personal computers that a hacktivist has at their disposal. They can send a command to all the computers in their network and have them all visit the same website over and over. This doesn't sound like a bad thing but when a bot net is millions of computers and they are using multiple threads, like viewing the same site 100 times simultaneously its more like 100,000,000 users. This is called a Distributed Denial of Service attack. or DDoS. This is mostly used by consumer or political activists as a way to hurt some organization they don't like. There are already defenses against this attack such as a firewall that has the ability to automatically block any IP address that has unusual attributes, like viewing the same site 100 times simultaneously. I personally think hacking has been overly romanticized by Hollywood.

While I do believe artificial intelligence could be achieved with binary processors and conventional programming I think what will really blow everyone's socks off is IBM Watson when it gets upgraded with IBM's new TrueNorth processors, which each have 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses. It would only take 50,000 of those babies to emulate 10% of the human brain and combined with the ability to re-purpose those neurons from moment to moment, it could easily become the leading expert in every field of science within the next 10 years.

Good to know, thanks.

I made a post about immortality on the Medicine forum. An expert there was so kind to expand upon what I was able to research. Immortality does not seem to be a stretch at all. It seems based on their current level of understanding of the problem and the rate of advancement we could have it optimistically in 30 years. If somehow we don't figure it out, based on projections of computer processing advancements by Ray Kurzweil, we would have supercomputers more than capable of simulating genetics, cellular mitosis and their emergent properties which would allow us to come to a complete understanding of the biological processes. There is also Molecular Manufacturing and Nanotechnology. Researchers have already created nanomotors smaller than the size of a cell, while basic, we are making great leaps in the field of nanotechnology. Some predictions are that we could have a Molecular Manufacturer, the ability to mass produce any design of a nanomachine, optimistically, within 30 years. To be conservative, 100 years is very, very likely. As far as relativistic speed and time dilation on interstellar travel, I was able to come up with an idea that would make an alien race capable of expanding throughout the entire galaxy within 1 million years. That idea was to use particle accelerators as thrusters. The LHC can accelerator particles up to 99% of the speed of light and if we had a thruster with an exhaust velocity 99% of the speed of light we could be capable of 0.5-1.0 m/s^2 of constant acceleration. The high exhaust velocity also reduces the mass of the propellant required. I did a basic calculation and you would only need an empire state building sized tank to do 0.5 m/s^2 and travel 4.6 lightyears in around 18 years. That would take them 2 million years. 1.0 m/s^2 seems in the realm of possibility as well. If they were immortal and had our population growth rate of 19 per 1000, we would have a population of 500 quadrillion by the year 3000. Terraforming is also not a huge stretch when you think about trillions of people living in space throughout the star system. With self-replicating autonomous industries, such as a spacecraft that serves the function of a Surveyor, Excavator, Hauler, Loader, Feeder, Crusher, Separator, Smelter, Mold Caster, Part Caster, Grinder, Assembler and eventually Molecular Manufacturer. The first seven have already been made mobile, the rest, minus molecular manufacturing already exist in the industry but not as mobile machines. With an industry that could grow exponentially through self-replication, we could scale an industry that mines, refines, smelts and casts steel parts within as little as 22 years. Then it would only take another 100 years to manufacture enough steel parts to build a sunshade, a spacescraper and 340 million 20 gigaliter supertankers. Then we use those things to move around gases to create Earth-like atmosphere on Venus and Mars. We can also use the Haber process to make Urea to fertilize the planets and use the Scheibersite from the M-Type asteroids to further fertilize. We could do all this by the year 2600 and this approach is much more pragmatic than other terraforming approaches. As far as not being able to detect them. I would assume they have a complete understanding of genetics and could easily achieve any outcome they wish with genetic engineering. They would also probably have the capability using nanomachines to alter the genetics of fully grown beings without negative side effects. With their level of nanotechnology they could easily have visual spectrum cloaks. They could have also been here long before we developed technology and would be able to access our ability to detect them long before we started looking or chanced upon them. They could also have withdrew anything we may detect as we developed the ability to detect them. As far as communications go, they may use lasers as direct line-of-sight communication instead of the more costly EM fields which radiate out in all directions. I think the most detectable thing would be sunshades.

I actually considered that. I read about ice melting in Antarctica and the tectonic plate rising so I built it in Antarctica and removed the same weight of ice. I basically did a jewel heist, lol I can't find anything that says it's impossible. The biggest limiting factor I keep seeing pop up is elevator shafts, because their cables can only be so long, so you can't take one elevator trip to the top, you'll have to get off and get on another every 500 meters.

Actually it's like 200 times, lol, the largest building is nearly a kilometer. I watched a documentary on the construction of the Burj Khalifa, they built it out of concrete and rebar. I am no expert and this isn't really something you can research. If you could link me some articles or suggest some concepts to look up, I'd appreciate it. From what I read, you can go as high as you want as long as you keep spreading out the load onto a wider and wider base.

I am a member of the school of hardknocks, I hope that's okay. For my homework assignment, I have to design a means to move 2 billion people into space per year. What I came up with is an octagonal spacescraper with 8 StarTrams. Height 200 km Width 38.63 km Weight 3.15 exagrams Floors 54,681 Floor Area 41,994,750 km^2 I just used the Burj Khalifa and scaled it. I am thinking I oversimplified the problem. I decided to build it in Antarctic and remove the same amount of weight of ice. I also made it a little wider to be on the safe side. I was also thinking that I would need airlocks every so many floors. That's about all I got. Any pointers would be awesome.

Vector graphics is a good idea, like SVG files, there is a free program called Inkscape that makes vector graphics. There is also LaTeX which is another type of image generator and it has more addons. There is a bundle+installer for windows called MikTex and there is another called TexLive which I think is more popular (I've only used on Linux). LaTex was cool because it let you draw and image using code, you can just write something like this: line(point(13,43),point(23,42)) and it would draw a line connecting two points (not a real example). I think LaTex is your best bet.

I haven't done much research on the string theory or any of the other theories for that matter. I just wanted to wrap my head around one particular part, the very, very, very beginning. Not just the beginning of our universe, but the beginning of everything. I tried to deduce it logically using philosophy and created something that was parallel geometrically. I know it has no basis in theoretical physics. Feel free to rip it to shreds but if you could I would really appreciate it if someone articulated a similar perspective in an established theory. ---- The Omniverse at the most universal perspective is both zero and infinity, it is Nothing and it is Everything. Everything is a signal and Nothing is noise. Nothing is so much signal that it becomes noise. From the most universal perspective, all dualities become a singularity, they are one in the same, synonymous and ambiguous. The Omniverse is a point within a space but is also a space within a point, depending on how you look at it. It is two points emerging from one, two equal and opposite points, Everything and Nothing. Everything sees Nothing and Nothing sees Everything. Everything feels Nothing within and Nothing feels Everything within. Everything and Nothing realize they are one in the same, viewing themselves from different perspectives. Everything and Nothing rise above themselves to become one again. Everything imagines a possibility, a line in the static of Nothing and it is created or did the line already exist in reality and Everything observed it? Creation and Evolution are equal and opposite positive feedback loops. Everything can be categorized as Observers and Observational Forces. As there are more and more Observers competing in the collapsing of the waves of probability, there are fewer and fewer possibilities. If there were no competing Observers, any possibility imagined by an Observer would become reality. The Omniverse has no beginning and no end, it is zero with random fluctuations, such as 0 diverging into +1 and -1. The two equal and opposite points interact with each other and both points interact with the source point. The duality will expand from the source and they interact with each other, going from a 0-simplex to a 2-simplex. The two points of the duality will begin to contract after one interval of omni-time but will diverge into two sub-dualities, which makes the overall structure a 6-simplex. Then the sub-sub-dualities will meet and cancel each other out, forming a 2-simplex, followed by the remaining duality, forming a 0-simplex. When the universe collapses, immediately after another duality will emerge with more momentum than the previous. This cycle will repeat, with each loop having more momentum, causing the peak to be greater and greater n-simplexes. The following is a representation of simplexes diverging and converging, in and out of existence. 0 → 2 → 6 → 2 → 0 0 → 2 → 6 → 14 → 6 → 2 → 0 0 → 2 → 6 → 14 → 30 → 14 → 6 → 2 → 0 From another perspective, you can think of the Omniverse as a circle growing larger in diameter. Is the circle growing larger in diameter or is the Observer moving closer? Both are one in the same. If a universe diverged, forming a 3-dimensional space with no matter present, there would be no competing Observers in the collapsing of the waves of probability and thus matter would spontaneously appear based on the properties of the universe. The effects of matter on distant space, that has expanded beyond the speed of the Observational Forces, makes it also possible that matter will continue to spontaneously emerge while the universe continues to expand faster than the effect of Observational Forces.

Okay. I will just stick with my particle accelerator thrusters, with 99.9% of lightspeed exhaust velocities. It's a capable propulsion engine.

I was wondering if there is anything in particle or theoretical physics that explicitly says that it's impossible for a particle to travel faster than the speed of light. Is it still in the realm of possibility? What if particles had no other option other than to go faster than the speed of light? Could a warp bubble form around it, until some superluminal friction pushed it back below the speed of light? Perhaps the excess energy would be displaced in the form of an increased amplitude gravitational wave? This is for a science fiction universe but I promised myself I would at least keep it plausible. I was hoping to use this concept for a propellantless propulsion drive. Basically a particle accelerator that pushed particles faster than the speed of light, then pushes more particles, which push on those particles, and off space-time itself.

I'm serious! With particle accelerator thrusters, they'd only need like half an empire state building worth of propellant, be able to do a constant acceleration of 0.5 m/s^2 and do like 10 lightyears in 30 years. They could take the whole galaxy in a million years!

I feel similarly. We have the whole global warming debate, it's a disaster. One side is taking a bad angle while attempting to bring it into the public spotlight, they aren't on the same page, they are miscommunicating, contradicting each other, etc. The other side thinks it's all a giant conspiracy, saying that the evidence has been falsified, etc. The truth is, neither side has it all right. They are both partly wrong and partly right. There's no conspiracy except the conspiracy of the human condition and all these little measures in carbon dioxide reduction are completely misinforming people who haven't done the research. It gives the impression that the problem can be solved with just people doing little things here and there and all contributing. That might work in some cases but not the case of global warming. Global warming would happen even if humans didn't exist. Our carbon emissions didn't cause global warming, a variation in solar radiation did, which melted some ice, which released trapped green house gases, increasing the global warming effect, which melted more ice. Scientists in Antarctica have been drilling out ice core samples kilometers thick. They analyzed the ice and found a way to measure it's age, the temperature of when it froze, the carbon dioxide and methane concentrations of the time. They know over 400,000 years. What the graphs show, is that there is an ice age every 90-100 thousand years and before the ice age, the global warming increases rapidly. Humanity isn't helping but ultimately it's emissions are small. Global warming would happen either way so reducing our own emissions isn't anything to celebrate about. It's like Obama hyping up that he was trying to get China to reduce their emissions. It sends a false impression. People misunderstand, politicians never get that shift in public opinion and nothing ever gets done. What we really need is to be carbon negative, to build carbon dioxide air filtering stations. We also need to come up with an idea to remove methane and reduce the greenhouse effect of our unburnt jet fuel. Reducing carbon emissions isn't good enough, even if we turned off all the machines, we'd still have global warming and an eventual ice age. It's totally worth it too! I saw predictions that there could be enough sea level rise in the next 100 years, to cause over 60 trillion in damages to coastal cities around the world. Carbon dioxide air filtering stations would cost less than 0.1% of that. Not to mention that there would be places on Earth too hot for life, all the climate change refugees trying to get into other countries. The coral reefs could die too and that means the fish that depend on them. That could ripple up and decrease fish populations and cause starvation in parts of the world heavily dependent. Longer term though, I am worried about the environment too. If our population growth continues at 19 births per 1000 people, we will become a giant continuous cityscape. The closest thing to nature will be a smattering of Central Parks. I think we should consider placing an "adapted land tax". Basically only land that is developed is taxed, land that is preserved is tax free. Then we can raise the tax to slow down expansion and preserve ecosystems. That would encourage more high rises, maybe underwater or floating cities and definitely subterranean cities. I hope we get it together in my lifetime, lol

There could be aliens on Earth. If a species a million years older than us, discovered immortality and embraced exponential population growth, they would have traveled to every star system in the galaxy by now. They may have us completely surrounded, at every neighboring star system.They could have terraformed hundreds of billions of worlds. They could have watched as planets with life, less developed, matured, achieved sentient and eventually global consciousness. They could be manipulating us through immortal agents implanted on the planet. We could be a reality TV show for scientists of an alien race. They could be on Earth, possibly found or there may be detectable evidence, in the form of sunshades around planets too close to their stars.

Thanks! I thought about it, I was just thinking that liquid fluoride thorium reactors are simpler and could be more easily built to last. I think fusion power would be extremely complex and fragile. I updated the spreadsheet to terraform Mars and Luna too. It wasn't that much extra effort after building up the industry.

What would microbes need? Instead of moving all of the Nitrogen to Mars, I was thinking about getting extra Hydrogen from Jupiter then using the Haber–Bosch process to make Ammonia which would react with the CO2 under the pressure and heat of the atmosphere, the Bosch–Meiser process, forming Urea. That would fertilize the whole planet.