Also, if memory serves, Roddenberry and the original writers *did* think there was something like a holodeck, but never came up with an affordable idea.
Similarly, I think they were supposed to have replication rather than cooks, but again, materializing food is waste of both special effects budget and time that could have gone to the episode.
There is a simple reason for the transporters in Star Trek (and thus the assorted three letter spinoffs).
The special effects budget.
It begin and ends there: they didn't have the budget to land a ship each week, so they concocted the transporters.
Which then turned into a plot crutch.
But as a plot crutch, it paled next to Commander Cleavage's "I sense . . . " and the time travel that means that the majority of the spinoff episodes never happened.
Time travel in science fiction is generally bad, with obvious holes and no reason to think that the "final" result remains final I've minutes later.
The only examples I can think of with non-stupid time travel are Turtledoves "Guns of the South" (fixed time displacement, keeping both ends in sync) and stuff like that series last year where a person can't appear in a time they've already been (which it didn't really seem to follow).
Compare that $7,500 up front (which history says will drop to a fraction of that with mass production) to a huge drop in annual insurance in a large city (far less compelling in rural areas).
If someone gets a $500/year insurance break, *and* gets back an hour a day by doing something else in the car instead of driving, it starts sounding cheap *really* quick
NDAs wouldn't cover the other car and its passengers . . .
It's a matter of working it out and allocating it, but it is "merely" that.
Once the accident rate/severity can be brought significantly below the of human drivers, the total cost of vehicle production and liability becomes less than the total cost of human vehicle and regular liability.
The only "real' issue here is whether to allocate the liability to the owner or the manufacturer--and even so, the total costs remains the same.
One possible solution is to make the manufacturer liable for the first twenty or twenty-five years, and the owner after that. This lets the "insurance" be built into the initial cost, and it can be financed as part of the car.
Wherever the liability is placed, the bottom line for the consumer/driver is going to be about the same.
The one allocation that will *not* work is the current system of liability for negligence by drivers and "product defect" by manufacturers; every accident would see expensive litigation over this. Liability really needs to be placed on one or the other (or in a fixed percentage).
hawk, attorney and displaced economics professor
p.s. Yes, this is an application of Coase' theorem, with the litigation costs being the cost of negotiation
I haven't been caught in snow that bad, but once was caught in fog so thick I could barely see the end of the hood--and ended up opening the door to creep down the road with the dotted line.
These conditions *do* exist, and clearing the windshield won't help when the vision obstruction is in the air.
while I've *seen* snow that drops visibility to a few feet, I was able to stay inside.
There's a reason I live in this desert . . .
hawk
(and, yes, there are deserts that get snow, and even parts of this valley--but where I am, it's a few inches in a single fall every 15 years or so. hmm, it's been eleven years . ..)
>I have a collector plated car with a fairly high end (for its time) cassette deck. Where I live, you get cheap >insurance with collector plates, but the laws here don't allow you to change the deck out for a cd player >or whatever.
There are shops that not only refurbish radios for classics, but add bluetooth input. I plan on doing this to the radio/8-track in my classic.
Hey,,, you can recored some Conway Twitty for my '72 Caddie convertible:)
I pick up rednecky 8-tracks for it when I stumble across them in thrift shops (which I hit to buy the vinyl I couldn't afford when it was new . ..)
Then again, I still keep a wire recorder, and even have a spare but broken cassette (weight eased in pounds) for it. I have delusions of getting it running someday,
320/line was about all you could display on NTSC. Apple's 280 was pushing it (but had horizontal margins), and you could, kind of, add half pixels that would extend a pixel, or start a pixel halfway through. This was how Apple tickled the color trap to get so many colors.
However, the color mask on the tube wouldn't have that many openings, so . . .
If you changed pixels faster than this, it just didn't work.
You could go more with B&W, though there is a sound trap at 4.5mhz which also needed to be avoided when using a television--which was important to the early industry.
640 was more a matter of being twice 320, and also 8x80--driven by the need for 24x80 displays. (some with a 25th status or other line).
Graphics therefore generally ended up with a multiple of 24 (or 25) lines, such as 480.
Nearly all of the early PCs either were geared to display on a television, or lied about it. The PET was its own weird thing in this regard (and you could do things from the keyboard that would overload and break the screen), while the TRS-80 and Compucolor actually used modified production model televisions as displays.
Once custom, really designed just for computers, monitors were economically practical, the size went yup (and up, and UP), usually in a 4:3 ratio. (This also meant separate color signals, rather than data and phase-shifted color carrier as with NTSC).
Finally, with 320 practically displayable spots per line, and about 450 of the 525 lines being displayable, there are about 150,000 pixels, not over 400k.
>The entire reason we developed representative government with elected officials is so we would >only need to take a few days out of our lives every couple years to worry about politics.
No, that just isn't correct.
Britain developed it much by accident.
Coming out of the feudal period, the king couldn't simply impose taxes; Parliaments were about getting the consent he needed for those/
Over time, Parliament came up with a "grievances before revenues" policy in which they wouldn't approve the revenues until the king met their other concerns. Over the years, this became legislation, and Parliament ultimately took the leading (now exclusive) role.
The Prime Minister arose when the king discovered he couldn't govern without a majority in Parliament--and over time shifted from Lords to Commons.
It is relatively recent that more than about 5% of Britain can vote for Commons.
In the US, representative government was not chosen for its own value, but as the most likely way to secure our liberty: its the means, not the ends.
I waited days (weeks?), iirc, before I wanted to post something enough to accept a cookie . . . (which is why I don't think the grandparent suggesting a couple of hours between 3 digit and high 4 digits is correct).
He is not "proposing" this idea--he's suggesting he can implement it.
The notion of suborbital/ballistic transport has been downright common for decades. The question isn't whether you could launch such a thing, or how long it would take, but rather the cost of propelling such a thing (and the willingness of anyplace to have an incoming object like this).
But the bad acting is part of what makes it Star Trek-is . . . Star Trek never would have worked if Shatner could act, or if the rest were all that good.
It won't *lead* to an oligopoly; it will remove one of the four oligopolists.
By reducing the number of oligopolists/increasing the concentration, the optimal price for the remaining members increases.
As a practical matter, if sprint is indeed already doomed to fail, the other three are the likely purchasers of its assets in bankruptcy--and I'd rather see it parceled out in bankruptcy then in a single deal like this.
We certainly have at least *some* evidence of the value to consumers of a fourth, smaller member of this oligopoly in tmobile's scrapping its own way back from near death a few years ago . . .
Also, this will give us some insight into the new administrations's monopoly policy--it *says* it will protect us from monopolies, antitrust enforcement has dropped from its highpoint in the Reagan administration, which bought into the Bork line that the *only* valid test was the effect on consumer welfare (instead of the prior "big is bad" which actually increased prices in widely dispersed industry), but has been watered down by each successive administration of either party. The DOJ now looks at "how much" pricing power the new entity will get, while the Bork/Reagan answer was, "if it's not zero, it's bad for the consumer."
in practice, some usages and programs made the interrupt issue more common, but until interrupts were disabled, the sale worked.
Just putting your whole palm on the keyboard could fire so many interrupts that it locked. A driver not returning/unmasking property could do it. A cutesy TSR or program that played with the could screw up and do it. For that matter, hardware not releasing properly and answering its driver back could do it.
there were *so* many ways . . .
It was hubris to think they licked the problem and not put a reset button on the computer. Apple solved this with the "programmer switch" in the bottom of the package that you could sap on to the mac to reach the two buttons on the motherboard. Heck, there was even an incantation ("g 0"?) that could sometimes recover.
It wasn't so much that CP/M used \ for directories (which I'm not even sure it *had* when ms-dos was written--also without directories) but that ms-dos mimicked its use of / to specify command options.
noone *cared* about directories until hard disks (except for macintosh folders which weren't actually directories until system 2 or 3m anyway). instead of directories you changed disks
Slashdot Mirror
Also, if memory serves, Roddenberry and the original writers *did* think there was something like a holodeck, but never came up with an affordable idea.
Similarly, I think they were supposed to have replication rather than cooks, but again, materializing food is waste of both special effects budget and time that could have gone to the episode.
hawk
There is a simple reason for the transporters in Star Trek (and thus the assorted three letter spinoffs).
The special effects budget.
It begin and ends there: they didn't have the budget to land a ship each week, so they concocted the transporters.
Which then turned into a plot crutch.
But as a plot crutch, it paled next to Commander Cleavage's "I sense . . . " and the time travel that means that the majority of the spinoff episodes never happened.
Time travel in science fiction is generally bad, with obvious holes and no reason to think that the "final" result remains final I've minutes later.
The only examples I can think of with non-stupid time travel are Turtledoves "Guns of the South" (fixed time displacement, keeping both ends in sync) and stuff like that series last year where a person can't appear in a time they've already been (which it didn't really seem to follow).
hawk
Compare that $7,500 up front (which history says will drop to a fraction of that with mass production) to a huge drop in annual insurance in a large city (far less compelling in rural areas).
If someone gets a $500/year insurance break, *and* gets back an hour a day by doing something else in the car instead of driving, it starts sounding cheap *really* quick
hawk
NDAs wouldn't cover the other car and its passengers . . .
It's a matter of working it out and allocating it, but it is "merely" that.
Once the accident rate/severity can be brought significantly below the of human drivers, the total cost of vehicle production and liability becomes less than the total cost of human vehicle and regular liability.
The only "real' issue here is whether to allocate the liability to the owner or the manufacturer--and even so, the total costs remains the same.
One possible solution is to make the manufacturer liable for the first twenty or twenty-five years, and the owner after that. This lets the "insurance" be built into the initial cost, and it can be financed as part of the car.
Wherever the liability is placed, the bottom line for the consumer/driver is going to be about the same.
The one allocation that will *not* work is the current system of liability for negligence by drivers and "product defect" by manufacturers; every accident would see expensive litigation over this. Liability really needs to be placed on one or the other (or in a fixed percentage).
hawk, attorney and displaced economics professor
p.s. Yes, this is an application of Coase' theorem, with the litigation costs being the cost of negotiation
I haven't been caught in snow that bad, but once was caught in fog so thick I could barely see the end of the hood--and ended up opening the door to creep down the road with the dotted line.
These conditions *do* exist, and clearing the windshield won't help when the vision obstruction is in the air.
while I've *seen* snow that drops visibility to a few feet, I was able to stay inside.
There's a reason I live in this desert . . .
hawk
(and, yes, there are deserts that get snow, and even parts of this valley--but where I am, it's a few inches in a single fall every 15 years or so. hmm, it's been eleven years . . .)
It seems to me I heard similar plans, with similar cost claims, about forty years ago . . .
Took a little less than a decade from design approval to launch.
hawk
>I have a collector plated car with a fairly high end (for its time) cassette deck. Where I live, you get cheap
>insurance with collector plates, but the laws here don't allow you to change the deck out for a cd player
>or whatever.
There are shops that not only refurbish radios for classics, but add bluetooth input. I plan on doing this to the radio/8-track in my classic.
hawk
Hey,,, you can recored some Conway Twitty for my '72 Caddie convertible :)
I pick up rednecky 8-tracks for it when I stumble across them in thrift shops (which I hit to buy the vinyl I couldn't afford when it was new . . .)
Then again, I still keep a wire recorder, and even have a spare but broken cassette (weight eased in pounds) for it. I have delusions of getting it running someday,
hawk
the obvious next step is to change his court or conviction file . . .
"Hey, Sarge! someone screwed up and put this idiot in a cell for jaywalking.'
And off he goes, free again . . . :)
hawk
Only on slashdot would anyone suggest a Beowulf cluster of space shuttles . . .
hawk
Not quite.
320 /line was about all you could display on NTSC. Apple's 280 was pushing it (but had horizontal margins), and you could, kind of, add half pixels that would extend a pixel, or start a pixel halfway through. This was how Apple tickled the color trap to get so many colors.
However, the color mask on the tube wouldn't have that many openings, so . . .
If you changed pixels faster than this, it just didn't work.
You could go more with B&W, though there is a sound trap at 4.5mhz which also needed to be avoided when using a television--which was important to the early industry.
640 was more a matter of being twice 320, and also 8x80--driven by the need for 24x80 displays. (some with a 25th status or other line).
Graphics therefore generally ended up with a multiple of 24 (or 25) lines, such as 480.
Nearly all of the early PCs either were geared to display on a television, or lied about it. The PET was its own weird thing in this regard (and you could do things from the keyboard that would overload and break the screen), while the TRS-80 and Compucolor actually used modified production model televisions as displays.
Once custom, really designed just for computers, monitors were economically practical, the size went yup (and up, and UP), usually in a 4:3 ratio. (This also meant separate color signals, rather than data and phase-shifted color carrier as with NTSC).
Finally, with 320 practically displayable spots per line, and about 450 of the 525 lines being displayable, there are about 150,000 pixels, not over 400k.
hawk
>The entire reason we developed representative government with elected officials is so we would
>only need to take a few days out of our lives every couple years to worry about politics.
No, that just isn't correct.
Britain developed it much by accident.
Coming out of the feudal period, the king couldn't simply impose taxes; Parliaments were about getting the consent he needed for those/
Over time, Parliament came up with a "grievances before revenues" policy in which they wouldn't approve the revenues until the king met their other concerns. Over the years, this became legislation, and Parliament ultimately took the leading (now exclusive) role.
The Prime Minister arose when the king discovered he couldn't govern without a majority in Parliament--and over time shifted from Lords to Commons.
It is relatively recent that more than about 5% of Britain can vote for Commons.
In the US, representative government was not chosen for its own value, but as the most likely way to secure our liberty: its the means, not the ends.
hawk
I want to say that there was a field where we typed the handle in that displayed at the top--but it's been a while . . .
And I believe that all of the posts from that period were lost.
hawk
>Only users with 4 digit IDs should be allowed to post in this thread.
Good idea.
The two and three digit UIDS went to spineless bootlickers willing to accept cookies. :)
hawk, who still blocks almost all cookies
I waited days (weeks?), iirc, before I wanted to post something enough to accept a cookie . . . (which is why I don't think the grandparent suggesting a couple of hours between 3 digit and high 4 digits is correct).
hawk
I didn't "forget"; that's the "cost" part I referred to!
He is not "proposing" this idea--he's suggesting he can implement it.
The notion of suborbital/ballistic transport has been downright common for decades. The question isn't whether you could launch such a thing, or how long it would take, but rather the cost of propelling such a thing (and the willingness of anyplace to have an incoming object like this).
hawk
But the bad acting is part of what makes it Star Trek-is . . . Star Trek never would have worked if Shatner could act, or if the rest were all that good.
hawk
It won't *lead* to an oligopoly; it will remove one of the four oligopolists.
By reducing the number of oligopolists/increasing the concentration, the optimal price for the remaining members increases.
As a practical matter, if sprint is indeed already doomed to fail, the other three are the likely purchasers of its assets in bankruptcy--and I'd rather see it parceled out in bankruptcy then in a single deal like this.
We certainly have at least *some* evidence of the value to consumers of a fourth, smaller member of this oligopoly in tmobile's scrapping its own way back from near death a few years ago . . .
Also, this will give us some insight into the new administrations's monopoly policy--it *says* it will protect us from monopolies, antitrust enforcement has dropped from its highpoint in the Reagan administration, which bought into the Bork line that the *only* valid test was the effect on consumer welfare (instead of the prior "big is bad" which actually increased prices in widely dispersed industry), but has been watered down by each successive administration of either party. The DOJ now looks at "how much" pricing power the new entity will get, while the Bork/Reagan answer was, "if it's not zero, it's bad for the consumer."
hawk, displaced economics professor
err, "jumper", not "super" . . .
Long ago in Cupertino . . .
Suddenly, Woz tilted his head and raised his fingers to his temple.
"Headache, Steve?" asked Jobs.
"No. It is as if there is a great disturbance, with thousands of people cursing my name!"
And thus the super was added requiring control to be down for the reset button to work.
hawk
After all these years, I still smile at the existence of the MNMI instruction . . . :)
hawk
No, it predates MS-DOS, too--it worked on the diskless machines which could at most be attached to a cassette for storage.
hawk
trust us, it's true. :)
in practice, some usages and programs made the interrupt issue more common, but until interrupts were disabled, the sale worked.
Just putting your whole palm on the keyboard could fire so many interrupts that it locked. A driver not returning/unmasking property could do it. A cutesy TSR or program that played with the could screw up and do it. For that matter, hardware not releasing properly and answering its driver back could do it.
there were *so* many ways . . .
It was hubris to think they licked the problem and not put a reset button on the computer. Apple solved this with the "programmer switch" in the bottom of the package that you could sap on to the mac to reach the two buttons on the motherboard. Heck, there was even an incantation ("g 0"?) that could sometimes recover.
hawk
It wasn't so much that CP/M used \ for directories (which I'm not even sure it *had* when ms-dos was written--also without directories) but that ms-dos mimicked its use of / to specify command options.
noone *cared* about directories until hard disks (except for macintosh folders which weren't actually directories until system 2 or 3m anyway). instead of directories you changed disks
hawk