Sending a robot into the household makes it much more difficult to predict which tasks will end up defined as "critical" by the people giving it orders. My first reaction to the bit about bringing beer was the same as yours, but it brings up some interesting issues.
Suppose the robot is cleaning a room when its human orders it to drop everything and go fetch some beer and food. The human is too busy watching the game, or playing bridge or whatever it is humans do, and doesn't know the robot was in the middle of cleaning the toilet. Will the robot realize it needs to sanitize its manipulators before fetching food, even if the human has placed all orders including beer into the "critical" category? This might be an easy decision to program into its code, but only if the designers have considered this possibility.
Another commenter here said the robot should let you stop taking your prescription meds if you'd rather spend the evening drinking. Your doctor might not want your robot to contribute to your unhealthy behavior. What should the robot obey: yours, or your doctor's orders? Or should it just obey you, but then quietly report your pill-skipping and beer-drinking to your insurance company?
In many other ways a household helper robot can get complicated to design, compared to designing an industrial robot for the factory floor. This may make it a good candidate for the "many eyes" model of open source design methods.
Especially good over dialup
on
Google Turns 10
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Of course this isn't much of a concern for most Slashdot readers these days, but one reason I switched to Google, however many years ago it was, and have kept coming back, has been their consistent consideration for those of us who are occasionally stuck with a slow net connection.
Using Yahoo over dialup is intolerable. By comparison Google's main search page is still lightning fast over a modem. Sure, they'll let you gum it up with all that "iGoogle" clutter if you insist, but if you avoid the eye candy temptations, you'll just get clean, fast, functional design.
And Gmail can be adjusted to have dialup-friendly settings much more easily than any other webmail service I've seen.
Congratulations! You have discovered one of the top responses the enemies of freedom would most fervently dream of seeing from you. When you say things like "ashamed to be an American" or "fuck you America," you play right into their hands.
The vast majority of people who see these statements will feel alienated from YOU, not from those who seek power through gradual broadening of police powers. The average reader will believe your sentiments make you part of the threat that they need to be protected from. When you do this you are giving aid and comfort to the very forces you oppose. They can point to carefully selected quotes from your overreaction and say "Look! There really are people right here in our cities who hate America!"
Get a grip on your emotions. Stop creating more excuses for those who want to clamp down on your freedoms. Stop stirring up the politics of fear and division. If you really want to protect the First Amendment and all the rest of our freedoms, state the merits of your principles with calm firmness.
You get excited about this? My friend, you should try taking some LSD, or having sex with a beautiful woman, or skydiving, or skiing down a 3000 meter mountain or anything else that adults do for excitement.
The entertainments you call fitting for adults strike me as juvenile pursuits. I would never seek to make it illegal for you to pursue them, but please clearly understand, I will never accept your claim that these interests make you a more mature adult human being.
Bringing about the birth of living worlds from previously dead worlds may be an impossible dream, as you claim, but the beauty of its potential is stirring enough to make it a worthy goal for a mature intelligent species.
If we fail to achieve this goal on Mars, we can and should find other planets where it can succeed. If we also fail to do that, it will be because we allowed ourselves to be distracted by short term pleasures such as those you describe, or because we followed your siren call to pour all our resources into repeatedly failing "solutions" for perennial problems such as poverty or disease. By all means, let us continue trying to solve humanity's problems on this planet. But don't use that as an excuse to shut down all space exploration efforts.
I care about humanity more deeply than you seem to be able to imagine. I care enough to want a future for humanity that extends beyond the lifespan of any single planet, beyond the lifespan of any single star system, and if possible, beyond the lifespan of any single galaxy. How is this any less mature than the desire of parents to hope their children and grandchildren might continue to prosper for many future generations?
If we fail to secure such a future for our descendants, the end result might very well be a sterile, dead universe, where nobody else will ever again have the chance to enjoy sex, skydiving, skiing or anything else adults do for excitement.
Bringing Mars to life may be so difficult it approaches the impossible. But it may be the best place to take the first step toward opening up the universe for humankind, and that makes it worth the effort.
No need to post anonymously. I am not inclined to seek revenge merely because your opinions differ from mine and also happen to be based on reasoning I find unconvincing.
Building a domed city is not the same as building a completely sealed environment. Even an undersea dome can be built with ventilation systems that keep it open to the atmosphere of the entire planet, preventing anyone from being "killed instantly" by vehicle pollution. Your second point is even less convincing, as there are several ways to provide natural sunlight to a domed city. Large portions of the dome can be transparent, or sunlight can be redirected into the city by mirrors and similar tech that is not terribly expensive or difficult to engineer.
Your third point is the weakest. It amounts to saying "Whatever I don't want to do, nobody else should be allowed to do, ever." This argument is pure nonsense. If you don't want to live somewhere, you should not be forced to lived there. On that much I will agree with you. However, your personal preference is not a valid argument against allowing others with different preferences to build places they find suitable and live in them.
Weren't we supposed to be able to build giant domes by now, large enough to enclose entire cities?
But wait! you might say. What practical purpose could this possibly serve? Do we have any cities that really need to be protected under huge domes? To which I would reply, yes. Yes, we do.
For example, New Orleans.
You might think I joke here, and maybe it is funny on one level. But think about it for a few moments more. If we make such an investment in the future of New Orleans, we could not build a flimsy dome that only keeps out mild rain showers. We must master the construction technology to withstand the biggest hurricanes the Gulf of Mexico can whip up. Beyond that, we would have to remember New Orleans is gradually sinking. Over the long term, that dome has to survive the pressure of being completely submerged under seawater.
And once we develop that set of technologies, entirely new cities can be built on the ocean floor.
No mention of Arthur C. Clarke's data cube, as posited in 3001! Imagine the entirety of a person's biological makeup, memories, and experiences over a lifetime, all captured in a portable storage device.
Perhaps with little pink hearts printed on each face of the cube?
This is the first time I've really wished I had mod points, just to mod your comment up and counteract the humorless twit who abused the "Overrated" modifier against you, NutMan. Since I don't have that power at the moment, I want to let you know some of us appreciate subtlety.
Pity the poor drones who replied to you in deadly earnest.
With definite limits on my disposable income, I have to grab whatever sorting mechanisms I can find to help me avoid the temptation to buy brand new $60 games. "Episodic" games help me do exactly that. No matter how interesting the game, the episodic publishing model tells me to wait until I can buy at least a whole "season" (to extend the TV metaphor a bit more) at one time. I may not save a whole lot of money if episodic games never develop the equivalent of the $5-$10 software bargain bin, but my approach has other benefits.
This way I not only avoid the long wait between episodes, I can also avoid games that get canceled before they release their full slate of planned episodes, and I can avoid spending my money at all until after all the episodes have been reviewed by gamers who lack my patience or just have a burning need to get rid of large amounts of excess cash.
Of course, if publishers can come up with an episodic game that really grabs my attention, they might get me as a customer while the game is still new. So far I haven't seen anything nearly compelling enough to give up what I gain by waiting. Maybe Bioware could be the one to win me over.
When such companies comb the Web for snippets of text, could their engines of litigation be defeated by the simple expedient of translating Gr34t w0rKs uv L1t3r4tur3 into leet-texts?
According to the manuals, a machine running Windows 2000 or XP needs only 64 MB of memory to run these applications. On Windows 98, ME, or NT, only 16 MB will be enough. On Windows 95, only 8 MB.
OpenOffice.org is great for modern computers, but those of us who like to extend the useful life spans of our older machines could be attracted by these very modest system requirements, and willing to spend a reasonable amount to buy the software.
Assuming the software doesn't slow to a crawl on a system with those minimum specs, of course.
Every time a story comes up on this topic I see a few people saying we ought to start profiling Muslims, and the only reason we aren't doing it is political correctness. There's a huge flaw in that theory: The obvious and easily profiled Muslims are the openly pious ones who are most likely to be peaceful and least likely to carry out any terrorist attack.
The real extremists, the ones who are willing to commit terrorism, are more likely to believe their religion allows them to pretend to be something else in order to defeat their enemies. They may not want to wear Western clothing, shave their beards, dye their skin pale white, take on Anglo-American names, forego their daily prayers, or eat pork rib platters for dinner, but extremists will do all of those things and more if it gives them a chance to strike at their perceived enemies. This is why ethnic profiling would be ineffective at best, and any feelings of safety it might create would be utterly false.
The refusal to openly endorse profiling of Muslims and Middle Eastern people in general is one of the things our government is actually doing right. Most of the people in these categories are not enemies of civilization. It would be a huge strategic mistake to treat all of them as if they were.
Too bad the article doesn't mention what the researchers plan to investigate next. An angle of 135 degrees between torso and thighs puts you halfway to lying down flat on your back. I'd be interested in learning whether similar benefits can be gained by reclining to just 100 degrees, or 105, or maybe 110.
Old-school management types might more readily accept a slightly reclined posture than one that takes your torso 45 degrees away from the vertical.
From everything I've read about the Space Shuttle design process, a major goal in making it reusable was to reduce the cost of getting into space. However, several competing interests within the government saddled NASA with conflicting demands. Attempting to satisfy everyone with one big multi-use tool made the whole system much more expensive to operate and maintain. It also strained the definition of "reusable" by needing major components that weren't reusable at all, and requiring the Shuttle itself to be almost entirely rebuilt between launches.
Now we're seeing more specialized designs. Heavy cargo launchers can be much cheaper when they don't have to carry people. Crew launch vehicles can be made safer at less cost if they aren't also being asked to carry heavy cargo loads.
The X-37B, if it leads to spacecraft that are truly reusable, could be another step toward making everything we do in space less costly and more productive. In the long run, that goal is far more important than any other mission in space, whether the short term goals are military or civilian ones.
Laws limiting the hours of work employers can demand are often based on safety arguments: tired workers have more accidents. Thus ideas like the 8-hour work day (at least, for work like driving trucks, operating heavy equipment, and working on factory assembly lines) get just enough support from the insurance lobby to overcome opposition from other business sectors.
If prescription drugs change that fact, making it possible to extend work hours dramatically without increasing accident rates, will it take long before employers require work shifts that run for days at a time?
Many people joke, somewhat grimly, about the casualty rate for Mars missions. In this case we have a serious lesson to draw from what is happening. Having several other probes active at the same time gives us options we otherwise would not have.
If Mars Global Surveyor had been out there all alone, mission controllers would have little choice other than waiting for it to somehow recover and renew contact on its own. Having Spirit, Opportunity, the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Express all out there at the same time, we get more chances to figure out some truly innovative way to save the troubled spacecraft.
However, if all these other efforts fail, we should seriously consider sending up a human repair crew to rescue Mars Global Surveyor. We have seen how the Hubble Space Telescope can rally public support for extra launches of the Space Shuttle. A thoughtfully run campaign to save Mars Global Surveyor could, in some small but perhaps crucial way boost public support for sending humans to Mars.
In my case, it is just in theory, because I don't store my passwords in my browser. So of course I'd agree with your main point. Informed and cautious use is the best security measure.
All the same, Internet Explorer doesn't need any of your passwords. Just running it poses a security risk.
These vague claims of "infringement" have certainly led to heavy discussion of Microsoft's deal with Novell. Ballmer has always been good at generating free publicity for Microsoft, and has never been too worried about whether Linux users liked him or not.
But that's just one possible goal here. It's also possible the resulting discussions will be closely watched by Redmond's intellectual property lawyers. Perhaps they hope to learn of new potential legal vulnerabilities they hadn't previously considered.
Let's see now. Internet Explorer has numerous gaping security holes, in actual widespread use, that make my own computer vulnerable to intrusion and could even result in malware taking over my system to turn it into a zombie. Firefox turns out to have a flaw that might, in theory, allow someone to pose as me on various web sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Sending a robot into the household makes it much more difficult to predict which tasks will end up defined as "critical" by the people giving it orders. My first reaction to the bit about bringing beer was the same as yours, but it brings up some interesting issues.
Suppose the robot is cleaning a room when its human orders it to drop everything and go fetch some beer and food. The human is too busy watching the game, or playing bridge or whatever it is humans do, and doesn't know the robot was in the middle of cleaning the toilet. Will the robot realize it needs to sanitize its manipulators before fetching food, even if the human has placed all orders including beer into the "critical" category? This might be an easy decision to program into its code, but only if the designers have considered this possibility.
Another commenter here said the robot should let you stop taking your prescription meds if you'd rather spend the evening drinking. Your doctor might not want your robot to contribute to your unhealthy behavior. What should the robot obey: yours, or your doctor's orders? Or should it just obey you, but then quietly report your pill-skipping and beer-drinking to your insurance company?
In many other ways a household helper robot can get complicated to design, compared to designing an industrial robot for the factory floor. This may make it a good candidate for the "many eyes" model of open source design methods.
Of course this isn't much of a concern for most Slashdot readers these days, but one reason I switched to Google, however many years ago it was, and have kept coming back, has been their consistent consideration for those of us who are occasionally stuck with a slow net connection.
Using Yahoo over dialup is intolerable. By comparison Google's main search page is still lightning fast over a modem. Sure, they'll let you gum it up with all that "iGoogle" clutter if you insist, but if you avoid the eye candy temptations, you'll just get clean, fast, functional design.
And Gmail can be adjusted to have dialup-friendly settings much more easily than any other webmail service I've seen.
Congratulations! You have discovered one of the top responses the enemies of freedom would most fervently dream of seeing from you. When you say things like "ashamed to be an American" or "fuck you America," you play right into their hands.
The vast majority of people who see these statements will feel alienated from YOU, not from those who seek power through gradual broadening of police powers. The average reader will believe your sentiments make you part of the threat that they need to be protected from. When you do this you are giving aid and comfort to the very forces you oppose. They can point to carefully selected quotes from your overreaction and say "Look! There really are people right here in our cities who hate America!"
Get a grip on your emotions. Stop creating more excuses for those who want to clamp down on your freedoms. Stop stirring up the politics of fear and division. If you really want to protect the First Amendment and all the rest of our freedoms, state the merits of your principles with calm firmness.
The entertainments you call fitting for adults strike me as juvenile pursuits. I would never seek to make it illegal for you to pursue them, but please clearly understand, I will never accept your claim that these interests make you a more mature adult human being.
Bringing about the birth of living worlds from previously dead worlds may be an impossible dream, as you claim, but the beauty of its potential is stirring enough to make it a worthy goal for a mature intelligent species.
If we fail to achieve this goal on Mars, we can and should find other planets where it can succeed. If we also fail to do that, it will be because we allowed ourselves to be distracted by short term pleasures such as those you describe, or because we followed your siren call to pour all our resources into repeatedly failing "solutions" for perennial problems such as poverty or disease. By all means, let us continue trying to solve humanity's problems on this planet. But don't use that as an excuse to shut down all space exploration efforts.
I care about humanity more deeply than you seem to be able to imagine. I care enough to want a future for humanity that extends beyond the lifespan of any single planet, beyond the lifespan of any single star system, and if possible, beyond the lifespan of any single galaxy. How is this any less mature than the desire of parents to hope their children and grandchildren might continue to prosper for many future generations?
If we fail to secure such a future for our descendants, the end result might very well be a sterile, dead universe, where nobody else will ever again have the chance to enjoy sex, skydiving, skiing or anything else adults do for excitement.
Bringing Mars to life may be so difficult it approaches the impossible. But it may be the best place to take the first step toward opening up the universe for humankind, and that makes it worth the effort.
No need to post anonymously. I am not inclined to seek revenge merely because your opinions differ from mine and also happen to be based on reasoning I find unconvincing.
Building a domed city is not the same as building a completely sealed environment. Even an undersea dome can be built with ventilation systems that keep it open to the atmosphere of the entire planet, preventing anyone from being "killed instantly" by vehicle pollution. Your second point is even less convincing, as there are several ways to provide natural sunlight to a domed city. Large portions of the dome can be transparent, or sunlight can be redirected into the city by mirrors and similar tech that is not terribly expensive or difficult to engineer.
Your third point is the weakest. It amounts to saying "Whatever I don't want to do, nobody else should be allowed to do, ever." This argument is pure nonsense. If you don't want to live somewhere, you should not be forced to lived there. On that much I will agree with you. However, your personal preference is not a valid argument against allowing others with different preferences to build places they find suitable and live in them.
Weren't we supposed to be able to build giant domes by now, large enough to enclose entire cities?
But wait! you might say. What practical purpose could this possibly serve? Do we have any cities that really need to be protected under huge domes? To which I would reply, yes. Yes, we do.
For example, New Orleans.
You might think I joke here, and maybe it is funny on one level. But think about it for a few moments more. If we make such an investment in the future of New Orleans, we could not build a flimsy dome that only keeps out mild rain showers. We must master the construction technology to withstand the biggest hurricanes the Gulf of Mexico can whip up. Beyond that, we would have to remember New Orleans is gradually sinking. Over the long term, that dome has to survive the pressure of being completely submerged under seawater.
And once we develop that set of technologies, entirely new cities can be built on the ocean floor.
Perhaps with little pink hearts printed on each face of the cube?
This is the first time I've really wished I had mod points, just to mod your comment up and counteract the humorless twit who abused the "Overrated" modifier against you, NutMan. Since I don't have that power at the moment, I want to let you know some of us appreciate subtlety.
Pity the poor drones who replied to you in deadly earnest.
With definite limits on my disposable income, I have to grab whatever sorting mechanisms I can find to help me avoid the temptation to buy brand new $60 games. "Episodic" games help me do exactly that. No matter how interesting the game, the episodic publishing model tells me to wait until I can buy at least a whole "season" (to extend the TV metaphor a bit more) at one time. I may not save a whole lot of money if episodic games never develop the equivalent of the $5-$10 software bargain bin, but my approach has other benefits.
This way I not only avoid the long wait between episodes, I can also avoid games that get canceled before they release their full slate of planned episodes, and I can avoid spending my money at all until after all the episodes have been reviewed by gamers who lack my patience or just have a burning need to get rid of large amounts of excess cash.
Of course, if publishers can come up with an episodic game that really grabs my attention, they might get me as a customer while the game is still new. So far I haven't seen anything nearly compelling enough to give up what I gain by waiting. Maybe Bioware could be the one to win me over.
When such companies comb the Web for snippets of text, could their engines of litigation be defeated by the simple expedient of translating Gr34t w0rKs uv L1t3r4tur3 into leet-texts?
(I sure hope not!)
According to the manuals, a machine running Windows 2000 or XP needs only 64 MB of memory to run these applications. On Windows 98, ME, or NT, only 16 MB will be enough. On Windows 95, only 8 MB.
OpenOffice.org is great for modern computers, but those of us who like to extend the useful life spans of our older machines could be attracted by these very modest system requirements, and willing to spend a reasonable amount to buy the software.
Assuming the software doesn't slow to a crawl on a system with those minimum specs, of course.
Every time a story comes up on this topic I see a few people saying we ought to start profiling Muslims, and the only reason we aren't doing it is political correctness. There's a huge flaw in that theory: The obvious and easily profiled Muslims are the openly pious ones who are most likely to be peaceful and least likely to carry out any terrorist attack.
The real extremists, the ones who are willing to commit terrorism, are more likely to believe their religion allows them to pretend to be something else in order to defeat their enemies. They may not want to wear Western clothing, shave their beards, dye their skin pale white, take on Anglo-American names, forego their daily prayers, or eat pork rib platters for dinner, but extremists will do all of those things and more if it gives them a chance to strike at their perceived enemies. This is why ethnic profiling would be ineffective at best, and any feelings of safety it might create would be utterly false.
The refusal to openly endorse profiling of Muslims and Middle Eastern people in general is one of the things our government is actually doing right. Most of the people in these categories are not enemies of civilization. It would be a huge strategic mistake to treat all of them as if they were.
Too bad the article doesn't mention what the researchers plan to investigate next. An angle of 135 degrees between torso and thighs puts you halfway to lying down flat on your back. I'd be interested in learning whether similar benefits can be gained by reclining to just 100 degrees, or 105, or maybe 110.
Old-school management types might more readily accept a slightly reclined posture than one that takes your torso 45 degrees away from the vertical.
From everything I've read about the Space Shuttle design process, a major goal in making it reusable was to reduce the cost of getting into space. However, several competing interests within the government saddled NASA with conflicting demands. Attempting to satisfy everyone with one big multi-use tool made the whole system much more expensive to operate and maintain. It also strained the definition of "reusable" by needing major components that weren't reusable at all, and requiring the Shuttle itself to be almost entirely rebuilt between launches.
Now we're seeing more specialized designs. Heavy cargo launchers can be much cheaper when they don't have to carry people. Crew launch vehicles can be made safer at less cost if they aren't also being asked to carry heavy cargo loads.
The X-37B, if it leads to spacecraft that are truly reusable, could be another step toward making everything we do in space less costly and more productive. In the long run, that goal is far more important than any other mission in space, whether the short term goals are military or civilian ones.
Laws limiting the hours of work employers can demand are often based on safety arguments: tired workers have more accidents. Thus ideas like the 8-hour work day (at least, for work like driving trucks, operating heavy equipment, and working on factory assembly lines) get just enough support from the insurance lobby to overcome opposition from other business sectors.
If prescription drugs change that fact, making it possible to extend work hours dramatically without increasing accident rates, will it take long before employers require work shifts that run for days at a time?
Many people joke, somewhat grimly, about the casualty rate for Mars missions. In this case we have a serious lesson to draw from what is happening. Having several other probes active at the same time gives us options we otherwise would not have.
If Mars Global Surveyor had been out there all alone, mission controllers would have little choice other than waiting for it to somehow recover and renew contact on its own. Having Spirit, Opportunity, the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Express all out there at the same time, we get more chances to figure out some truly innovative way to save the troubled spacecraft.
However, if all these other efforts fail, we should seriously consider sending up a human repair crew to rescue Mars Global Surveyor. We have seen how the Hubble Space Telescope can rally public support for extra launches of the Space Shuttle. A thoughtfully run campaign to save Mars Global Surveyor could, in some small but perhaps crucial way boost public support for sending humans to Mars.
In my case, it is just in theory, because I don't store my passwords in my browser. So of course I'd agree with your main point. Informed and cautious use is the best security measure.
All the same, Internet Explorer doesn't need any of your passwords. Just running it poses a security risk.
These vague claims of "infringement" have certainly led to heavy discussion of Microsoft's deal with Novell. Ballmer has always been good at generating free publicity for Microsoft, and has never been too worried about whether Linux users liked him or not.
But that's just one possible goal here. It's also possible the resulting discussions will be closely watched by Redmond's intellectual property lawyers. Perhaps they hope to learn of new potential legal vulnerabilities they hadn't previously considered.
Let's see now. Internet Explorer has numerous gaping security holes, in actual widespread use, that make my own computer vulnerable to intrusion and could even result in malware taking over my system to turn it into a zombie. Firefox turns out to have a flaw that might, in theory, allow someone to pose as me on various web sites.
I'm still laughing at the IE users.