Slashdot Mirror

My apologies, the correct link is here

Sounds fun for a sci-fi story. Not unlike the Slaver disintegrator from Larry Niven's work.

The handwave is that one is temporarily violating conservation of energy to create a particle/antiparticle pair, but doing it so briefly (for a time hbar/(pair energy)) that it's ok due to the uncertainty principle. Something similar to your gadget (in some sense) is the alleged source of Hawking radiation near black holes.

Trying to understand the vacuum is still a very hot issue. We know vacuum fluctuations exist; they're responsible for things like the Lamb shift in the spectrum of hydrogen. On the other hand, general relativity tells us that empty space must have pretty close to no net energy density, while a naive estimate of the energy from vacuum fluctuations is huge. Trying to reconcile these ideas is the main motivation for quantum gravity and supersymmetry (in which the vacuum energy density vanishes perfectly, by construction!).

you mean shigawire

I can see it now. Sony Playstaion X being bought by enemy nations to harvest their AI cards and install them in a new autonomous guidance module for SWORDs.

At present, the SWORD robot is operated with a thirty-pound control unit with two joysticks, buttons and a video screen. I wonder how much the current control module looks like a playstation portable?

You can trick out your ride.

Boeing, though, and the development of the D-IVH, is heavily subsidized by the military. Boeing is rapidly becoming "the" defense contractor, having swallowed up McDD. Throw in some sweetheart 767 tanker leasing deals...and you can't hardly say that Boeing is anything but a large piece of the military-industrial complex. I will definately agree that it does represent a leap in technology for the USA, but is still short of the mid-80's Soviet Energia. The D-IVH can carry 28,000 pounds to geosynchronous orbit...the Energia could lift 36,000 pounds to the same path. The D-IVH can lift 48,000 pounds to LEO, the Energia could lift 200,000. So while the D-IVH is quite an accomplishment, it's not a Saturn V.

http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=52
Somewhere, Frank Herbert is smiling.

It's pretty cool that this is coming to pass, even if they're not sandwiched between force fields.

"Smart clothes," feh. Wake me up when they've developed mimetic polycarbon.

Not so long ago, there was a news story about the EU comming up with, and launching their own GPS system.
I quote from the article
"The paper also reported that a disagreement between the US and the EU regarding Galileo at a London conference resulted in a threat to blow up the planned satellites. The European delegates reportedly said that they would not turn off or jam signals from their satellites, even if they were used in a war with the US."

Maybe this is just the USAF Jumping the gun, and getting one up on the EU Nations, so that when they do go live with their GPS System, it won't seem that this jamming system is targeted specifically at it.

Google is your friend.

there used to be a good site out there that had bsod photos from atms etc. -- there's a few matches in google but not the page i remember -- anyone know the site?

It even comes with a Media Player.
There was even a slashdot post about it, but I do not seem to be able to find it.

...they will be running windows media player.

What a useless waste of space. I'm holding out for a chairdog!

They have invented the ornithopter. Frank Herbert imagined a feudal galactic civilization in the wake of an anti-AI jihad, where technology raced forward in the shadow of the religous edict "thou shalt make no machine in the image of the mind of a man". Artificial intelligences were verboten, but vast augmentations of the human mind were fair game.

On present-day Earth we struggle with similar taboos, like stemcell research. This ratty project points to a vast potential for human/machine interface and learning. After they perfect the training of these resynthesized rat brains for controlling an airplane, they seed their tanks with human nervous stemcells. Once the training regime is "humanized", these flying tissues might be grafted into existing human brains with more stemcells: brain plugins. We might grow various motorskills, like flying, driving, or space navigation, simultaneously in tanks, while we train our "default" brains a more oldfashioned way, then plug them all in to "graduate".

All those old pictures of "future humans" showed our descendants with big cranium globes. Lots of us have laughed at those pics, because past evolution trends towards bigger skulls have probably stopped with human siezure of our own reproduction. But maybe those big skulls are just artificial expansion bays...

Amusingly enough, something like this was predicted by SF author E.E."Doc" Smith back in 1931.

I can get leather whenever I want it and until we all stop eating real meat the leather I buy won't be hurting any animals.

What I want is a chairdog!

...It's not usually a DIY job. Same with designing a microwave.

Exactly!!! Certified experts have already designed those products for use by Joe-average. He can cook all kinds of meals without needing to install new gas fittings, adjust microwave frequencies, or fiddle with particle beams. :-)

I have argued for years that the general, home-user PC device should have matured into appliance-level sophistication (ie: easy to use) YEARS ago. The "complexity" of the modern PC operating systems are total overkill.

Now, depending on which programs I elect to use, I would agree that an increased level of knowledge is necessary. For example, if I load Quicken for Small Business, I better understand something about accounting, finance, banking, etc...

But if all I want to do is read e-mail, surf the web, and play a game, I should ONLY be required to understand the complexities of entering URLs, knowing the difference between Reply and Reply-to-all, and that I want to play the Recruit level -not the Frag-Master level.

...As soon as you increase the complexity of the system, you run into problems.

That's my point! PC's are waaay too complex for their most common uses. That we (the tech industry) have delivered machines that require so much care-and-feeding just for the O/S is a complete embarassment. And to add insult to injury, we (the tech industry) often maintain the arrogant attitude of "well, if they're too stupid to use it, they don't deserve to read e-mail..." instead of saying to ourselves "you know, Joe-average shouldn't have to deal with all this crap just to access some basic communication services."

Good call. Here is a short explanation for those who are scratching their heads over what 'that program from The Recruit' might possibly have to do with solid liquids. Short answer: It doesn't; start reading more books!

And if somebody can explain "Groklaw" -- "grok law"? -- to me, I'd appreciate.

Has anyone ever tried to recreate William Gibson's Sandbenders computers? There has to be a market for hand-crafted computers/computer cases...

I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing computer cases in those Oxfam/Fair Trade shops?

We don't yet have a grand unified field theory or even know for certain how many dimensions there are in our universe. Imagine if researchers made a breakthrough like James Blish's spindizzy while working toward smaller electronics. Don't laugh. There are people working on this right now and not all of them are on the fringe.

I wonder if the Church of Fools has worked out the theological implications of the fact that their priests and pastors are now avatars?

...cause then it turns into Ice IX!

"The QL is a monster to work with' he said..."It has no priorities, no real sense of needs or goals. It thinks, but it may not solve. Quantum logic can outline the center of a problem before it understands the principles and questions, and then, from our point of view, everything ends in confusion. More often than not, it comes up with a solution to a problem that is not stated. It does virtually everything but linear, time's arrow ratiocination."

All mass transit will be high speed conveyer belts!

William Gibson called custom computers sandbenders in his 1996 novel Idoru - so that makes it 7 years behind the time ;)

There are earlier references. In 1981, Niven & Pournelle described a very similar device in OATH OF FEALTY. The main character (whose name escapes me at the moment) has sub-cutaneous implants that allow her two-way communication with a very large computer nicknamed "MILLIE".

The setup consisted of sub-cutaneous implants which detect nerve signals associated with sub-vocalized speech and transmit them via RF to MILLIE. MILLIE then translates the signals into words/commands. MILLIE sends messages back via RF, which are picked up by an implanted receiver and signals are sent to a cochlear implant. So the heroine and the computer talk back and forth via radio.

Heinlein almost got it right 40 year earlier when some of his characters in THE PUPPET MASTERS used what amounted to an implanted cell phone that used bone conduction for both speaking and listening.

I.V.

There are earlier references. In 1981, Niven & Pournelle described a very similar device in OATH OF FEALTY. The main character (whose name escapes me at the moment) has sub-cutaneous implants that allow her two-way communication with a very large computer nicknamed "MILLIE".

The setup consisted of sub-cutaneous implants which detect nerve signals associated with sub-vocalized speech and transmit them via RF to MILLIE. MILLIE then translates the signals into words/commands. MILLIE sends messages back via RF, which are picked up by an implanted receiver and signals are sent to a cochlear implant. So the heroine and the computer talk back and forth via radio.

Heinlein almost got it right 40 year earlier when some of his characters in THE PUPPET MASTERS used what amounted to an implanted cell phone that used bone conduction for both speaking and listening.

I.V.

I'm ready for my droud

See Frank Herbert's Oil Lens for more info and quotes from the book.

Here is another entry from Technovelgy. This one actually references real world research published in Applied Physics plus some early experiments done with rotating blobs of mercury.

The Sims "level designer" (i.e. the architectural tools for editing your house, buying and placing objects) are built into the game, which makes it possible for 8-year-old kids to easily "design levels".

But there's a lot more to customizing and creating you own game than "level design". The Sims also lets you design your own characters and objects, plug them together to tell stories, and even publish the stories online.

The Sims' storytelling ability hinges on the player's ability to add their own characters (skins) and scenery (objects) into the set, to illustrate whatever stories they want to tell.

Thanks to player created content, The Sims becomes more like the open-ended Perky Pat layouts in Philip K Dick's book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic not only make it possible for characters to customize the game to tell their own stories, but also share their creations with other players, and download objects from the web to play in their own games.

High quality subscription web sites like SimFreaks actually pay talented artists to create beautiful sets of themed objects, like the Christmas Gingerbread House set.

Some experienced artists are generous enough to freely teach other Sims players how to create their own objects, by publishing step-by-step tutorials in the principles of object making for the complete novice, at sites like The Bunny Wuffles School of Sims Transmogrification.

The celebrated designers at the Cultural Heritage Foundation have made names for themselves by using Transmogrifier and other tools to create all the necessary scenery to build amazing historical recreations, like The Palm House, Kew Gardens, London England, the Isambard Kingdom Brunel Theme, and the Turkish Baths.

Maxis has created a wide range of objects for The Sims, which are included with the original game, the seven expansion packs, and numerous free downloads. But the player created object outnumber the Maxis created objects by an order of magnitude.

The Sims also opens up opportunities for programmers as well as artists: third party software developers like SimPrograms and SimsTools have created a market for tools that enable players to manage their Sims objects, and artists to make even more of them.

I'm developing some easy-to-use tools that automate the Transmogrification process, and open up Sims object creation to wide range of people. RugOMatic enables anyone, even without artistic talent or technical skills, to quickly create their own rugs for The Sim by dragging and dropping pictures and text.

RugOMatic

When am I going to get my Stillsuit

Everybody's getting excited about the tensile strength of buckytubes: 600x that of steel, by mass. Space elevators, drug delivery, yadda yadda yadda. What about shigawire, an essential technology proposed by Frank Herbert in his epochal _Dune_ novels? Similar to Larry Niven's monomolecular filaments, these prefigures of long buckytube strands are used for vast data storage, and for slicing through any material, even "plasteel", like a knife through butter on their monomolecular "edge". Where's the 100m buckytube with my genome on it, with which I can rappel down a cliff face, and slice a loaf of bread into julieanned splendor?

I never expected to see a development like this; as a sci-fi aficionado, it's quite interesting to see some of the other methods that have been highlighted both fictionally and in the news.
The first thought that entered my mind was that this could be used, if sufficiently refined, in a similar manner to a USB "keyring drive" - you just carry all your data with you and snap it into a workstation wherever you go. This could well be the same deal... or it could be the basis for those goofy wood-block circuit elements they used in the original Star Trek ;-)
Or you could make smart cards "smarter"... more info, possibly with a tamperproof MD5 someplace so the information carried on the card can't be faked.

I do realise that data and Information Technology is becoming an increasing part of our lives, and there's a great drive towards more power and more storage - but what about reducing bloat, increasing security, and making data and software (whether for work, entertainment, whatever) of better quality? It's almost like something out of Philip K. Dick - eventually, we'll drown in our own digital kipple (not to mention landfills consisting wholly of old PC components and AOL CDs)

Anyone got any idea how this method of storage stacks up against (real and theoretical) things like magnetic, optical, quantum, holographic and crystalline?