I didn't like the article. I recall reading a better one a while back that explained quantum computing in terms of the Many Worlds (or parallel universe) hypothesis.
Any software like this must be limited to writing specific classes of programs. Godel's Theorem says there is no such thing as a general algorithm to write *any* algorithm. See "The Emperor's New Mind".
Unrelated aside: why can't we have [I] and [/I] type shorthand for formatting on/.?
I agree with those who say this is a let down because the real challenge is making wire and doing metal work not batteries. In fact, with enough wire, organic batteries, a magnetic piece of metal, some sheet metal, he could have made a spark coil and antenna - a primitive Marconi transmitter - and used a piece of coal or pyrites and fine wire "cat's whisker" as a detector at the other end - a simple receiver and headphone-like contraption. = RADIO. The first radios were that simple.
Then offer $2 billion to put someone on Mars. The Chinese probably won't take your money for political reasons, but I'm damn sure India will, probably buying Chinese rocket parts off the shelf.
Oh, wait - you meant, how can we give $2 billion to Americans to do it? Well, forget it - you need to spend that much just on the Oversight Steering Committee Review Board's annual team building retreat to Aspen.
You haven't hookers and cocaine in that figure have you?
I gave up on that fat Stephenson book from his baroque thing (I forget what it was called - the one with Newton and the Royal Society etc). I hated the way it changed gears. I disagree that he is superior to Gibson - GIbson is a far superior prose stylist. I think Gibson's problem is that he peaked early in some ways and it's hard to top - Burning Chrome and Neuromancer were great books.
pretty much assumed corporations (masquerading around as governments, churches, and media companies) will eventually take over everything
Gibson did exactly that in what is effectively a sequel, Count Zero, except he went further and had the corporations themselves dwarfed by cyber entities that had become God-like.
Snow Crash is inventive and very clever but it doesn't have Gibson's literary feel nor the depth of his characters. Snow Crash seemed to me to also be self-consciously trying to be post-mod "cool" eg pizza delivery samurai boys - yeah, right. Neuromancer did not seem be trying quite so hard and was more about the prose.
He (j00r0mzcxvfg... or whatever that handle is) has a point except now Neuromancer would be best served by being treated as an alternate world story rather than a futuristic parable. The producers should have some dashes of David Cronenberg (not too much please!) and just a hint David Lynch for that, and quite a bit of Ridley Scott at his peak for gritty techno realism.
Neuromancer was a true original, a great book with a breathtakingly fresh take on the future while paying serious homage to various fictional forms and icons of the past. There are elements of Philip K Dick, Bradbury, Asimov, Chandler etc within Neuromancer, not to mention that defining splash of film noir. And GIbson's influences from post war literary fiction is also apparent in both style (economical, tight, muscular prose - it's damn well written) and characterizations. The cosmic scope of his imagination became even more jaw-droppingly apparent in the sequel, Count Zero.
Younguns who weren't out of nappies in the '80s could be forgiven for not understanding what a revelation that book was. Many of us had stopped reading scifi altogether - it had stopped having anything to say. The "internet" as such did not exist for consumers. Portable computers, luggables, were yet to arrive. And here was this book, the book that first coined the term "cyberspace".
Many of the ideas in Neuromancer got morphed and diluted into other books and films. Could a film do justice to this iconic book? Maybe.
And, in interstellar terms, our radio emissions haven't even traveled very far yet. The signals may well have been swamped and disrupted at just 2 light years: http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/1427054
Right, but you are assuming They are actively looking our way. They might not be - yet. We're a needle in a haystack and our existing radio emissions may well have been missed.
This is no justification for *continuing* to advertise our presence in our current cavalier fashion. Why press our luck? The only sane route is for us to assume the worse and STFU - maybe the Borg will not spot us.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. There are plenty of explanations for the of seti discoveries. We are ourselves in the process of switching to fiber optics. And some forms of communication look like white noise. Furthermore, you are supposing our physics is as good as it gets, a supposition that is looking increasingly unlikely. We have not cracked physics yet, contrary to what some buffoons claim. There may well be a super science, in fact it is likely there is a much deeper science of reality than we currently are capable of understanding. Until we really know how the universe works - if we ever will - we cannot rule out entirely the possibility of unimaginable space and time travel mechanisms.
I think there may have been a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode along these lines?
Anyway - the point is well made. People are busy projecting their "fluffy evolved" or "nasty insect" fantasies onto what aliens may want, need or like, or what their "ethics" might be like. All of which is just speculation. And saying that there are thermodynamically cheaper ways for an advanced civilization to get resources or protein totally misses the point, which is: *we just don't know*. We don't know what their idea of "rational" is, or what their sensory tastes might be like. Or what they value. We don't know. We humans have done terrible things to other people and other species in the name of fashion, gourmet tastes or quirky trends. We might think we are an expensive and polluted form of protein, but to them, we might taste *so* good. And like us, they might have a penchant for original flavors rather than substitutes. We might make amusing pets, screaming and running around and reverting to primitive behavior for a while before we suicide or otherwise die.
Hawking is right. Blasting messages out into space willy-nilly, without yet understanding at all what we might be attracting and relying on cute fluffy ET fantasies or projecting our idea of "ethics", is totally and completely stupid. The sooner we go completely fiber optic and radio silent the better.
Too many assumptions. When did you last mine resources from gas giants?
aliens don't need planet-based fossil fuels. they have nuclear fission of course
Oil - a fast diminishing resource on Earth - is a fabulously rich cocktail of valuable chemicals for the manufacture of all kinds of pharmaceuticals, plastics etc etc. It is a crying shame that we burn it. Only a planet with carbon-based biological history like ours could have oil. We have no way of knowing how rare that might be.
Empathy may not even be comprehensible to aliens. They would be much more likely to get altruism, or say an adult sacrificing to preserve a nephew since there are biological rationales for those things (now that group selection is back in favor I believe).
there is far less nationalistic or religious conflict on the Earth today and the percentages of death related to that have dropped drastically since World War II.
I'm not sure this is true. What has changed is the structure of war. We now have far more non-winnable, endless guerrilla style conflict, insurgencies, and terrorist activity. And we still have bloc-aligned war - the coalition versus Iraq most recently.
There's way too many suppositions there. The Drake Equation still has far too many unknowns for us to gauge how many civilizations there are or have been. There might be just two - us and the Hive Mind Brain Eating Giant Insect ships.
Personally I hate the idea that ISPs are being allowed to redefine "internet service" to just mean port 80 traffic.
Yeah but, unfortunately, those who say this is capitalism at work are largely right. The web is big business, big advertising. This is one reason Google and others have pushed hard on the move to webapps, RIAs, online video etc. It's all about the web and has been for years.
Usenet is still very useful, but not to advertisers. Not anymore, not compared to the huge volumes on the web. On the web, "spam" is that banner ad or annoying flash ad embedded in the page.
Also I don't think powers that be have ever liked the anarchic uses of usenet eg the potential for anyone to start some group and talk about anything.
One of the reasons a process of societal and cultural revolution like the Enlightenment is difficult in the Muslim world is the lack of any central authority and peripheral control network in Islam. There is no supreme power to negotiate or reason with or to manage and accept change. Also, the Roman church had a monopoly on education and scholarship, so they could mandate what was ok and what was not. Like it or not, the Roman Papacy and the church's power relations with thrones provided a supreme power. If the Church could handle it then most of Europe could.
The Koran allegedly prohibits any single priest from mediating between a believer and Allah. There can be no Islamic Pontiff-equivalent and no single group uniformly interpreting Islam for the whole Muslim world. In short, there is no-one to overrule a silly traditional prohibition or to modernize Islam in a way that everyone has to go along with. Instead, there are thousands of Mullahs and seminaries each with their own views, some of them extreme.
For this reason, an Islamic Enlightenment is problematic.
I've used all those or similar.
Bash's getopt however needs some real improving last time I looked. It's possible to workaround some of its shortcomings but it's somewhat trial and error and I'm not sure how portable workarounds would be. The bored may see my attempts to get getopt to be more useful in [shameless plug] http://tripl.sourceforge.net/ [/end plug]
My guess is this is too much moola to add to the BOM for most netbooks, so don't expect CoreAVC to ship preinstalled. Unless CoreAVC will do a massive bulk discount to OEMs.
Most of the hard core Star Wars fans I knew growing up washed their hands of the whole thing (some even went to the dark side... Trek...)
Trek is not the dark side. Blake's 7http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake's_7 is the dark side, and a rich and fertile darkness it is, too. Which is why "they" are going to remake it. Hope they don't ruin it.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't like the article. I recall reading a better one a while back that explained quantum computing in terms of the Many Worlds (or parallel universe) hypothesis.
Any software like this must be limited to writing specific classes of programs. Godel's Theorem says there is no such thing as a general algorithm to write *any* algorithm. See "The Emperor's New Mind". Unrelated aside: why can't we have [I] and [/I] type shorthand for formatting on /.?
I agree with those who say this is a let down because the real challenge is making wire and doing metal work not batteries. In fact, with enough wire, organic batteries, a magnetic piece of metal, some sheet metal, he could have made a spark coil and antenna - a primitive Marconi transmitter - and used a piece of coal or pyrites and fine wire "cat's whisker" as a detector at the other end - a simple receiver and headphone-like contraption. = RADIO. The first radios were that simple.
Justin Bieber
Sarah Palin
Any Boy Band
All copies of The Sound of Music
The entire Bush family
"They're everywhere, and they're against the American way of life!" Instant funding for any Mars space voyage.
Then offer $2 billion to put someone on Mars. The Chinese probably won't take your money for political reasons, but I'm damn sure India will, probably buying Chinese rocket parts off the shelf.
Oh, wait - you meant, how can we give $2 billion to Americans to do it? Well, forget it - you need to spend that much just on the Oversight Steering Committee Review Board's annual team building retreat to Aspen.
You haven't hookers and cocaine in that figure have you?
I gave up on that fat Stephenson book from his baroque thing (I forget what it was called - the one with Newton and the Royal Society etc). I hated the way it changed gears. I disagree that he is superior to Gibson - GIbson is a far superior prose stylist. I think Gibson's problem is that he peaked early in some ways and it's hard to top - Burning Chrome and Neuromancer were great books.
pretty much assumed corporations (masquerading around as governments, churches, and media companies) will eventually take over everything
Gibson did exactly that in what is effectively a sequel, Count Zero, except he went further and had the corporations themselves dwarfed by cyber entities that had become God-like.
Snow Crash is inventive and very clever but it doesn't have Gibson's literary feel nor the depth of his characters. Snow Crash seemed to me to also be self-consciously trying to be post-mod "cool" eg pizza delivery samurai boys - yeah, right. Neuromancer did not seem be trying quite so hard and was more about the prose.
Neuromancer was a true original, a great book with a breathtakingly fresh take on the future while paying serious homage to various fictional forms and icons of the past. There are elements of Philip K Dick, Bradbury, Asimov, Chandler etc within Neuromancer, not to mention that defining splash of film noir. And GIbson's influences from post war literary fiction is also apparent in both style (economical, tight, muscular prose - it's damn well written) and characterizations. The cosmic scope of his imagination became even more jaw-droppingly apparent in the sequel, Count Zero.
Younguns who weren't out of nappies in the '80s could be forgiven for not understanding what a revelation that book was. Many of us had stopped reading scifi altogether - it had stopped having anything to say. The "internet" as such did not exist for consumers. Portable computers, luggables, were yet to arrive. And here was this book, the book that first coined the term "cyberspace".
Many of the ideas in Neuromancer got morphed and diluted into other books and films. Could a film do justice to this iconic book? Maybe.
And, in interstellar terms, our radio emissions haven't even traveled very far yet. The signals may well have been swamped and disrupted at just 2 light years: http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/1427054
This is no justification for *continuing* to advertise our presence in our current cavalier fashion. Why press our luck? The only sane route is for us to assume the worse and STFU - maybe the Borg will not spot us.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. There are plenty of explanations for the of seti discoveries. We are ourselves in the process of switching to fiber optics. And some forms of communication look like white noise. Furthermore, you are supposing our physics is as good as it gets, a supposition that is looking increasingly unlikely. We have not cracked physics yet, contrary to what some buffoons claim. There may well be a super science, in fact it is likely there is a much deeper science of reality than we currently are capable of understanding. Until we really know how the universe works - if we ever will - we cannot rule out entirely the possibility of unimaginable space and time travel mechanisms.
So you are prepared to gamble with our species on the offchance that aliens might be nice? With no evidence?
Hawking is right. Blasting messages out into space willy-nilly, without yet understanding at all what we might be attracting and relying on cute fluffy ET fantasies or projecting our idea of "ethics", is totally and completely stupid. The sooner we go completely fiber optic and radio silent the better.
aliens don't need planet-based fossil fuels. they have nuclear fission of course
Oil - a fast diminishing resource on Earth - is a fabulously rich cocktail of valuable chemicals for the manufacture of all kinds of pharmaceuticals, plastics etc etc. It is a crying shame that we burn it. Only a planet with carbon-based biological history like ours could have oil. We have no way of knowing how rare that might be.
Aliens might want our rare chemical resources.
.. then they may come here to wipe us out purely as revenge for sending them Family Guy.
Empathy may not even be comprehensible to aliens. They would be much more likely to get altruism, or say an adult sacrificing to preserve a nephew since there are biological rationales for those things (now that group selection is back in favor I believe).
there is far less nationalistic or religious conflict on the Earth today and the percentages of death related to that have dropped drastically since World War II.
I'm not sure this is true. What has changed is the structure of war. We now have far more non-winnable, endless guerrilla style conflict, insurgencies, and terrorist activity. And we still have bloc-aligned war - the coalition versus Iraq most recently.
There's way too many suppositions there. The Drake Equation still has far too many unknowns for us to gauge how many civilizations there are or have been. There might be just two - us and the Hive Mind Brain Eating Giant Insect ships.
Personally I hate the idea that ISPs are being allowed to redefine "internet service" to just mean port 80 traffic.
Yeah but, unfortunately, those who say this is capitalism at work are largely right. The web is big business, big advertising. This is one reason Google and others have pushed hard on the move to webapps, RIAs, online video etc. It's all about the web and has been for years.
Usenet is still very useful, but not to advertisers. Not anymore, not compared to the huge volumes on the web. On the web, "spam" is that banner ad or annoying flash ad embedded in the page.
Also I don't think powers that be have ever liked the anarchic uses of usenet eg the potential for anyone to start some group and talk about anything.
One of the reasons a process of societal and cultural revolution like the Enlightenment is difficult in the Muslim world is the lack of any central authority and peripheral control network in Islam. There is no supreme power to negotiate or reason with or to manage and accept change. Also, the Roman church had a monopoly on education and scholarship, so they could mandate what was ok and what was not. Like it or not, the Roman Papacy and the church's power relations with thrones provided a supreme power. If the Church could handle it then most of Europe could. The Koran allegedly prohibits any single priest from mediating between a believer and Allah. There can be no Islamic Pontiff-equivalent and no single group uniformly interpreting Islam for the whole Muslim world. In short, there is no-one to overrule a silly traditional prohibition or to modernize Islam in a way that everyone has to go along with. Instead, there are thousands of Mullahs and seminaries each with their own views, some of them extreme. For this reason, an Islamic Enlightenment is problematic.
I've used all those or similar. Bash's getopt however needs some real improving last time I looked. It's possible to workaround some of its shortcomings but it's somewhat trial and error and I'm not sure how portable workarounds would be. The bored may see my attempts to get getopt to be more useful in [shameless plug] http://tripl.sourceforge.net/ [/end plug]
Never mind - I see they do volume licensing http://corecodec.com/oem
My guess is this is too much moola to add to the BOM for most netbooks, so don't expect CoreAVC to ship preinstalled. Unless CoreAVC will do a massive bulk discount to OEMs.
Most of the hard core Star Wars fans I knew growing up washed their hands of the whole thing (some even went to the dark side... Trek...)
Trek is not the dark side. Blake's 7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake's_7 is the dark side, and a rich and fertile darkness it is, too. Which is why "they" are going to remake it. Hope they don't ruin it.