People wince when they scrape their car, because in a very real sense they feel like they hit a part of themselves.
Bullshit. People wince when they scrape their cars because its resale value just dropped. You don't wince when you drop your screwdriver and it was part of your hand ten seconds earlier. You might wince if it breaks and you have to buy a new one. Nobody driving a beater cares if it gets another dent. Anyone whose identity depends on their car should be treated by a mental health professional, because that's just fucking crazy.
Well gee, you sure showed the body of neuroscience.
Take a computer then, because the same phenomenon applies: the reason you can use a mouse proficiently is because of exactly the same process. For the duration your holding and interacting via mouse, as far as your brain is concerned it's actually an extension of your body - it's why you don't need to plan how you're going to move your hand to get the cursor somewhere.
Your screwdriver example doesn't apply, because like you said - you dropped it. It was disconnected and no longer part of you. But while you're holding it, you use it very much as though it was a limited part of your hand, and neurologically your brain doesn't really care about the difference.
You can map these types of changes with fMRI, they're very fluid and with time can eventually become fixed as well (even to the point of detriment). People who do things with their hands - say, play the piano or golf - at an elite level usually get taken out when they develop "the shakes" - which is a neurological condition that is a direct result of the over-enlargement of the region of the brain dealing with the hands, to the point that it encroaches on neighboring tissue, and basically starts receiving interference.
You may say it's because they know the resale value changed - and yes, part of that would be - but the fact they can drive and have even a passing familiarity with the boundaries and behavior of the vehicle is because neurologically, when you drive your brain reconfigures your body map to the limits of the car. The sense of familiarity you feel behind the wheel is exactly this process.
Conversely the brain's body map is actually incredibly malleable anyway - since it expands and contracts to deal with tools you're using and transitioning to or from. People wince when they scrape their car, because in a very real sense they feel like they hit a part of themselves.
With time (and well, it's definitely a permanent part of him) I suspect he could recover full function to the point of not needing to think about it.
The refrigerator you can buy today, compared to the 1970s, is 3 times as large, and uses a 1/3rd the electricity.
Any sustainability proposal that begins by assuming people must have less, isn't really a sustainability proposal at all - and besides, any proposal that starts with "people should act different" is already irrelevant. We have a lot of experience with where that road leads us.
PV technology works. My fairly large suburban house would be electrically self-sufficient on a 15 kW PV array. We have 9 kW. The panels, sans subsidy, take about 10 years to pay for themselves. Expanded, to the state-level, that is not an unreasonable figure nor an unreasonable amount time (and these are expensive, high efficiency panels to boot).
But more importantly, solar tech scales well. Solar thermal technology can provide baseload power via thermal storage, and that's just made with mirrors, turbines (from coal plants of all places) and salt. With real government commitment - say, to the the tune of the aforementioned $30 billion that China pumped into it's PV market, the US could easily begin deploying baseload solar with a goal to decommissioning the the now very old nuclear powerplants which it hasn't been replacing to date - it's a political easy win, and solves a number of real problems. It can also be deployed quickly - nuclear plants take 10 years to build.
Proposing "more research" is proposing to do nothing. Research takes 10-15 years to turn into viable manufacturing processes. You need electrical power today. It's also wholly unnecessary though - we have the technology, what we lack is the political will to kick start deployment.
KeePass 2 can be run on Mono and is multi-user for the databases - you all need the same password to decrypt the database however, but it does allow simultaneous shared access.
You currently pay for petrol, roads, administrative oversight, traffic lights, emergency services necessary to keep these things all running...
Cars are giant sinkholes of money, and only work as well as they do in cities because we have an extreme amount of support services. Centralizing and organizing can only reduce costs in the long run. When some idiot runs out of gas, or breaks down on a major freeway at peak hour because they didn't do scheduled maintenance, what sort of cost do you think that has on the economy overall as well?
This seems more likely to be due to the easy money currently seeming to be in iOS apps. It's a big installed base, there's a delivery system, and the consumers have been trained to expect to pay some money for just about everything on it (whereas the usefulness of free 'droid apps generally seems to be way higher - in my, admittedly limited, experience).
I mean, if you have an idea, then the thing you want to do is try and get a few hundred thousand people to buy it for a $1, so that's what everyone is currently doing. I don't think it really says anything beyond that.
The flying wing thing sounds like the rather more mundane solar-powered aircraft that are getting built. AFAIK the military is looking into those as kind of "low altitude" satellites since they can stay aloft indefinitely.
Fighter piloting is hardly non-specific. The modern combat aircraft is essentially completely digital already as far as air-to-air combat goes. Targeting and observation is done by radar, infrared etc. Chances are pattern match algorithms would do a better job then most people in identifying things visually too. The planes themselves already are flown by computer - modern fighters forgo stable flight in the name of performance, and are only controllable because computer systems make the thousands of minute flight control adjustments needed for it.
I had a BJC-55 for a while when I was using a laptop in my later high school years (back when - I presume - laptops were rare). Although it wasn't particularly practical, the fault had nothing to do with IrDA - which connected and setup on Windows pretty flawlessly.
I do remember it being quick enough that if I slid a device past the port, they'd link up and promptly delink when out of range pretty commonly.
So yeah - I'm in full agreement. It would be awesome if we could have a light-based gigabit data protocol for arbitrary devices. It wouldn't be a terrible way to replace RS-232 as a universal, user-accessible interconnect, either.
If your backups to the server need gig-e, you're doing it wrong. Using rsync, I was able to backup 5GB of e-mail over an ADSL connection (12mbit) in 14 minutes, because it compresses everything.
Are you serious or just being funny? Text compresses well. Video does not. 5GB is nothing. I have more than 10 TB of video from favorite shows/movies, almost another TB in photos, and about 300 GB of ripped music.
And that data is completely new everyday? You can't steal, rip or buy movies faster than a Wi-Fi connection could back it up. The grandparent has it correct... Wi-Fi fits be bill for most home needs.
Even a few hundred megs takes an uncomfortably long time to transfer over wi-fi though. Heaven help you if you're taking a system image backup - which is worth doing every now and again.
Around our house, we have a Cat6 cable tucked just under the couch so when you're sitting down and suddenly find yourself trying to move a lot of data off a laptop, you can plugin fairly easily.
PulseAudio exists because we live in an age of cloud computing and remote desktop usage. Not to mention wanting to be able to do things like individually control the sound level or mute specific applications Which means you need a way to get sound from a lot of different sources - and ideally you'd prefer to do that all with the same API.
I don't know why PulseAudio tends to have the problems it does (though admittedly, I've actually never had any problems with it), but it's a necessary evolution.
You're far better off just making sure you can actually get at the wiring relatively easily. If there's one thing I've learned about home wiring, is that the more sure you are that you'll never change something, the more likely it is that you have to get in their with the hammer-drill to try and change it later on.
I've had in-wall network cables go bad too - at the end of the day, you want your stuff to be accessible for as much of the run as possible. If you're building new, there's really no excuse for not provisioning that way.
A keyboard-smash 128 character password on an AES-encrypted zip file would be enough I'd think.
Though this also sounds like a good opportunity for someone to write a Dokan filesystem for it (maybe something which just does the above?). I already use OTR encryption with Gtalk - it's kind of funny going through my Gmail account and seeing all the encrypted conversations. Sad that pretty much no one can be convinced to use GPG for regular email though.
Well I was speaking more towards "things which look like computers on TV" then anything else, but the point also stands: using an interface for an extended period where your arms aren't resting on something to be supported becomes extremely tiresome. It's also impractical to have a touchscreen desktop monitor for pretty much the same reasons.
There are very good reasons most interfaces have lasted as long as they have (i.e. the computer mouse).
Well I also wouldn't want it to be called "The Pillager" or "Deathpad" or anything else.
Software is software - it's naming should be close to emotion neutral when it's intended for wide consumption. I don't want to read "Gigolo" everytime I'm trying to browse a Windows workgroup, since the prostitution industry does evoke universally good emotions - it's tied to a very mixed bag of human experience, almost doubly so for the men in it.
And yet that's like 3 versions after they were first introduced, since literally every instruction tutorial for earlier versions goes "apt get remove --purge..." something.
Don't kid yourself: holographic tablets, in fact all computer interfaces as seen in entertainment - are garbage. They exist specifically to be incomprehensible to the audience, so you don't have to fill out everything that's on there, yet they always seem highly functional because the plot demands them to be.
Slashdot Mirror
People wince when they scrape their car, because in a very real sense they feel like they hit a part of themselves.
Bullshit. People wince when they scrape their cars because its resale value just dropped. You don't wince when you drop your screwdriver and it was part of your hand ten seconds earlier. You might wince if it breaks and you have to buy a new one. Nobody driving a beater cares if it gets another dent. Anyone whose identity depends on their car should be treated by a mental health professional, because that's just fucking crazy.
Well gee, you sure showed the body of neuroscience.
Take a computer then, because the same phenomenon applies: the reason you can use a mouse proficiently is because of exactly the same process. For the duration your holding and interacting via mouse, as far as your brain is concerned it's actually an extension of your body - it's why you don't need to plan how you're going to move your hand to get the cursor somewhere.
Your screwdriver example doesn't apply, because like you said - you dropped it. It was disconnected and no longer part of you. But while you're holding it, you use it very much as though it was a limited part of your hand, and neurologically your brain doesn't really care about the difference.
You can map these types of changes with fMRI, they're very fluid and with time can eventually become fixed as well (even to the point of detriment). People who do things with their hands - say, play the piano or golf - at an elite level usually get taken out when they develop "the shakes" - which is a neurological condition that is a direct result of the over-enlargement of the region of the brain dealing with the hands, to the point that it encroaches on neighboring tissue, and basically starts receiving interference.
You may say it's because they know the resale value changed - and yes, part of that would be - but the fact they can drive and have even a passing familiarity with the boundaries and behavior of the vehicle is because neurologically, when you drive your brain reconfigures your body map to the limits of the car. The sense of familiarity you feel behind the wheel is exactly this process.
Conversely the brain's body map is actually incredibly malleable anyway - since it expands and contracts to deal with tools you're using and transitioning to or from. People wince when they scrape their car, because in a very real sense they feel like they hit a part of themselves.
With time (and well, it's definitely a permanent part of him) I suspect he could recover full function to the point of not needing to think about it.
The refrigerator you can buy today, compared to the 1970s, is 3 times as large, and uses a 1/3rd the electricity.
Any sustainability proposal that begins by assuming people must have less, isn't really a sustainability proposal at all - and besides, any proposal that starts with "people should act different" is already irrelevant. We have a lot of experience with where that road leads us.
PV technology works. My fairly large suburban house would be electrically self-sufficient on a 15 kW PV array. We have 9 kW. The panels, sans subsidy, take about 10 years to pay for themselves. Expanded, to the state-level, that is not an unreasonable figure nor an unreasonable amount time (and these are expensive, high efficiency panels to boot).
But more importantly, solar tech scales well. Solar thermal technology can provide baseload power via thermal storage, and that's just made with mirrors, turbines (from coal plants of all places) and salt. With real government commitment - say, to the the tune of the aforementioned $30 billion that China pumped into it's PV market, the US could easily begin deploying baseload solar with a goal to decommissioning the the now very old nuclear powerplants which it hasn't been replacing to date - it's a political easy win, and solves a number of real problems. It can also be deployed quickly - nuclear plants take 10 years to build.
Proposing "more research" is proposing to do nothing. Research takes 10-15 years to turn into viable manufacturing processes. You need electrical power today. It's also wholly unnecessary though - we have the technology, what we lack is the political will to kick start deployment.
That our modern economy is entirely predicated on use and consumption of a non-renewable, globally harmful fuel source?
Also that you should consider that it's a big issue and there are summaries of it on many types of web sites.
KeePass 2 can be run on Mono and is multi-user for the databases - you all need the same password to decrypt the database however, but it does allow simultaneous shared access.
You currently pay for petrol, roads, administrative oversight, traffic lights, emergency services necessary to keep these things all running...
Cars are giant sinkholes of money, and only work as well as they do in cities because we have an extreme amount of support services. Centralizing and organizing can only reduce costs in the long run. When some idiot runs out of gas, or breaks down on a major freeway at peak hour because they didn't do scheduled maintenance, what sort of cost do you think that has on the economy overall as well?
This seems more likely to be due to the easy money currently seeming to be in iOS apps. It's a big installed base, there's a delivery system, and the consumers have been trained to expect to pay some money for just about everything on it (whereas the usefulness of free 'droid apps generally seems to be way higher - in my, admittedly limited, experience).
I mean, if you have an idea, then the thing you want to do is try and get a few hundred thousand people to buy it for a $1, so that's what everyone is currently doing. I don't think it really says anything beyond that.
The flying wing thing sounds like the rather more mundane solar-powered aircraft that are getting built. AFAIK the military is looking into those as kind of "low altitude" satellites since they can stay aloft indefinitely.
Fighter piloting is hardly non-specific. The modern combat aircraft is essentially completely digital already as far as air-to-air combat goes. Targeting and observation is done by radar, infrared etc. Chances are pattern match algorithms would do a better job then most people in identifying things visually too. The planes themselves already are flown by computer - modern fighters forgo stable flight in the name of performance, and are only controllable because computer systems make the thousands of minute flight control adjustments needed for it.
If you're leaving your photos on flash-cards and websites in the first place, then that's your fundamental problem.
Save them to (redundant) disk locally, then commit them to a cloud backup service.
Longer lasting incandescent bulbs also burn more power.
You don't just price it by replacement cost - you price it by lifetime power usage.
I had a BJC-55 for a while when I was using a laptop in my later high school years (back when - I presume - laptops were rare). Although it wasn't particularly practical, the fault had nothing to do with IrDA - which connected and setup on Windows pretty flawlessly.
I do remember it being quick enough that if I slid a device past the port, they'd link up and promptly delink when out of range pretty commonly.
So yeah - I'm in full agreement. It would be awesome if we could have a light-based gigabit data protocol for arbitrary devices. It wouldn't be a terrible way to replace RS-232 as a universal, user-accessible interconnect, either.
If your backups to the server need gig-e, you're doing it wrong. Using rsync, I was able to backup 5GB of e-mail over an ADSL connection (12mbit) in 14 minutes, because it compresses everything.
Are you serious or just being funny? Text compresses well. Video does not. 5GB is nothing. I have more than 10 TB of video from favorite shows/movies, almost another TB in photos, and about 300 GB of ripped music.
And that data is completely new everyday? You can't steal, rip or buy movies faster than a Wi-Fi connection could back it up. The grandparent has it correct... Wi-Fi fits be bill for most home needs.
Even a few hundred megs takes an uncomfortably long time to transfer over wi-fi though. Heaven help you if you're taking a system image backup - which is worth doing every now and again.
Around our house, we have a Cat6 cable tucked just under the couch so when you're sitting down and suddenly find yourself trying to move a lot of data off a laptop, you can plugin fairly easily.
PulseAudio exists because we live in an age of cloud computing and remote desktop usage. Not to mention wanting to be able to do things like individually control the sound level or mute specific applications Which means you need a way to get sound from a lot of different sources - and ideally you'd prefer to do that all with the same API.
I don't know why PulseAudio tends to have the problems it does (though admittedly, I've actually never had any problems with it), but it's a necessary evolution.
Linux needs PulseAudio.
It needs the ability to mix and vary arbitrary sound sources, and it's much better to do all that in one driver layer then in a whole bunch of them.
But PulseAudio needs to be fixed so it actually works well out-of-the-box.
You're far better off just making sure you can actually get at the wiring relatively easily. If there's one thing I've learned about home wiring, is that the more sure you are that you'll never change something, the more likely it is that you have to get in their with the hammer-drill to try and change it later on.
I've had in-wall network cables go bad too - at the end of the day, you want your stuff to be accessible for as much of the run as possible. If you're building new, there's really no excuse for not provisioning that way.
A keyboard-smash 128 character password on an AES-encrypted zip file would be enough I'd think.
Though this also sounds like a good opportunity for someone to write a Dokan filesystem for it (maybe something which just does the above?). I already use OTR encryption with Gtalk - it's kind of funny going through my Gmail account and seeing all the encrypted conversations. Sad that pretty much no one can be convinced to use GPG for regular email though.
Well I was speaking more towards "things which look like computers on TV" then anything else, but the point also stands: using an interface for an extended period where your arms aren't resting on something to be supported becomes extremely tiresome. It's also impractical to have a touchscreen desktop monitor for pretty much the same reasons.
There are very good reasons most interfaces have lasted as long as they have (i.e. the computer mouse).
Well I also wouldn't want it to be called "The Pillager" or "Deathpad" or anything else.
Software is software - it's naming should be close to emotion neutral when it's intended for wide consumption. I don't want to read "Gigolo" everytime I'm trying to browse a Windows workgroup, since the prostitution industry does evoke universally good emotions - it's tied to a very mixed bag of human experience, almost doubly so for the men in it.
And yet that's like 3 versions after they were first introduced, since literally every instruction tutorial for earlier versions goes "apt get remove --purge ..." something.
And suddenly I'm aware of BackBlaze.
Don't kid yourself: holographic tablets, in fact all computer interfaces as seen in entertainment - are garbage. They exist specifically to be incomprehensible to the audience, so you don't have to fill out everything that's on there, yet they always seem highly functional because the plot demands them to be.
Also names which aren't sexual innuendo. A network browser app cannot be called "Gigolo".