If FTL is possible, everything -- everything -- falls apart, because we've knocked out causality. There may be something left if causality falls, but no branch of science or philosophy offers us any tools to analyze it.
If FTL is not possible, then the more advanced our communication and computation and HCI become, the less motivation we have to move even beyond low orbit. Think of how gamers whine about hundred-millisecond ping times today. Now imagine continuous, fine-grained, fully-integrated access to post-Google at the pre-conscious level -- and imagine that suddenly half your thoughts are experiencing multi-second latency. Not even the most inveterate stoner would be eager to tolerate that sort of impairment.
And the idea of traveling to another solar system? It would amount to forking reality, with the travelers effectively removing themselves from Earth's consensus universe forever.
What sort of progress? Oh, I don't know -- perhaps the six-order-of-magnitude increase in memory size, or the four-order-of-magnitude increase in processing speed, or the one-order-of-magnitude-plus reduction in weight, or the two-order-of-magnitude reduction in volume, or...
Look, if what you want is a machine with the power, storage, battery life, and durability of the PC8201a, we can easily hook you up. Of course, you're going to pay for it, because there's no economy of scale in manufacturing it -- nobody wants a machine with those specifications, unless it's in the wristwatch form-factor, and dedicated to a fairly simple task. I'm guessing that a heart-rate monitor is a pretty close match.
I seem to remember reading (decades ago) about people successfully grafting tomato plants onto hemp root stock, and getting THC-bearing foliage. Guess it was a false report, though, or by now it would be pretty widespread.
I'm still not clear on why these plant structures are necessary for production of the chemical, as opposed to concentration. But that's not surprising, as I'm no sort of biologist.
Well, most ionic liquids are expensive. Not all, though -- you can make one with a eutectic mix of choline chloride and urea that's liquid at room temperature, and the components are available for pennies per kilogram. (Choline chloride is chicken feed, and urea is a bulk fertilizer.)
I'm sure a semiconductor manufacturer wouldn't be using anything so mundane. Then again, they'd probably be using micrograms at most per chip.
No, no, no. You're supposed to ditch your old-fashioned, behind-the-times collaborators and start hanging out with the cool kids. "Work" and "substance" are totes last-century.
So, heart attacks go up by 10% in the wake of spring-forward, but fall by 10% in the wake of fall-back? The solution is clear, then -- we need to adopt an official 25-hour day.
The twice-yearly clock shift really is a silly, silly exercise. Not so silly as a uniform, one-size-fits-all, year-around schedule for work, school, and entertainment, but silly all the same.
Pulse dialing actually cost the phone company more for a long time, as I understand it, because it kept the switching circuitry busy longer than tone dialing. But they'd won the right to charge extra for tone dialing, and the more people shifted to tone dialing (for its obvious benefits), the more money they could get.
My wife and I were also holdouts, keeping our cheap electronic phones set to pulse-dial (hit "speed dial 8", then wait for the clickety-clicking to finish), switching to tone-dial as needed for voicemail. Even if it wasn't worth spending a few extra seconds a day to save a few extra cents a day, it was worth it to us to deny the phone company those ill-gotten cents.
And if you had ignored all the people who said "you can't do that" or "it won't work" or "no one has ever done that", you... probably wouldn't have survived grad school in chemistry. Or, for that matter, driver's education.
Sometimes, when everybody says you're wrong, it's because you're wrong.
You never know how far you go until you finish failing.
I don't know how far you're going to go with this.
Unfortunately, no. But it does look at least a bit more interesting than "electrostatic attraction draws the film upward", which was what i guessed before reading the linked articles.
For a given budget, you can field a whole lot more drones than manned vehicles. Even if they have to be continuously teleoperated, drone controllers are a lot cheaper than pilots, and drones are a lot cheaper to operate than manned vehicles.
I expect that before the end of the decade every squad car will carry multiple drones. This horse is out of sight of the barn.
I did a project or two on Mac Common LISP, but I don't even remember whether that was an IDE or not. It's been a looooong time.
Even earlier than that, I used some Pascal dev environment on the TRS-80, but I don't think you could call it an IDE. Not much room for integration in 48K.
You show me a computer that can translate poetry (or even literary prose) properly and I'll believe you.
What? "Speech recognition" doesn't exist until "automatic poetry transliteration" is perfected? Sorry, I'm getting too old for all this goalpost-chasing.
It's not a question of whether something turns out to be a breakthrough, it's whether you can legitimately describe it as an "invention" rather than "a series of technological improvements in various fields culminating in X".
Here, I can't even tell whether we're moving goalposts or begging questions. Or maybe it's those darned Scotsmen again. Regardless, the post to which I responded tried to characterize a list of technologies as "largely market breakthroughs". I wanted to point out what I saw as flaws in that characterization. I'll grant that this may be getting a bit far afield from the original article's points.
I'd say many of these these are largely market breakthroughs, the application of an existing technology to a new market. If anything, with the exception of the Internet, these demonstrate the article's point.
7. Speech recognition. Computerized version of break audio into components, looking them up in a translation table, and report results.
8. Automatic language translation. Computerized version of looking something up in a translation table and reporting results.
Wow. Just wow. You really have no idea what actually goes into natural-language recognition and translation. For starters, we've been able to "break audio into components and look them up in a translation table" for, oh, fifty or sixty years now. Speech recognition was "ten years away" for the first thirty or forty of those years. Now, it's basically arrived, although there's still plenty to be done.
What made it possible? Partly, it was these last four or five orders of magnitude of improvement in processor speed and memory size. But there's also a colossal amount of research in signal processing, statistical analysis, and AI that you're simply sweeping under the rug.
By the same reasoning you applied to these points, the Internet is even less of a "breakthrough" -- it's a simple iterative advance stemming from more numerous and widely-used computers, better data-transmission technology, and new market demand. Except that it's anything but "simple", and the "iterations" that led to it took us over a precipice. On this side of the precipice, everything is different.
When you come right down to it, every invention is an "iterative advance" based on pre-existing technology, simply because you can't really base an invention on technology that doesn't exist yet, and because you can't take infinite steps. So, your observation may be technically valid, but I don't think it's useful.
Nearly everybody needs at least some degree of both luck and hard work to succeed. It's easy to point to folks who show little evidence of hard work, but there are certainly counterexamples -- I'd say Ping Fu is one.
Seems like a bomb blast would alter the level of everything in the brain. Of course, those levels should stabilize within a few seconds, with final values determined by the heights of the surfaces they land on.
I believe you need to go back and reread that particular fable. The Boy who Cried Wolf eventually was ignored by everyone else -- and then, when a real wolf came along, they ignored his warning.
The story is, of course, a warning against habitual lying for attention. But it can also be viewed as a cautionary tale against the easy ad-hominem dismissal.
And with wireless connectivity, the contents could be interactive and collaborative. Just the thing for a Young Lady.
I seriously hope this is not the model flexible-display producers adopt. Yeah, you get some advantages from a bound stack -- quick rough navigation, coarse physical bookmarking -- but you lose the ability to spread a selection of sheets out on a desk. On the other hand, if it's easy to drag a copy of a page onto the desk, which itself is a display surface... nah, the microtransaction fees would kill you.
...keep your velocity higher than 80% or so of c. If your velocity drops below the velocity of light in the repelling surface, the Cherenkov radiation goes away, there's no more repulsion, and you land on the surface cruising at.5c or so. Hope the tires on your landing gear are properly inflated.
Actually, now that I think about it, you'd probably get plenty of backup lift from the relativistic plasma formerly constituting the repulsive surface and the bottom of your vehicle. I withdraw my objection.
Should be easier than that. Set up multiple concentric focus zones -- we've got contacts like that already for "bifocal" use -- and dynamically black out all zones but the one you want to use. It wouldn't work especially well in bright light, though, where your pupil is contracted, because you'd only be "seeing through" the central zone anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
If only I had mod points.
If FTL is possible, everything -- everything -- falls apart, because we've knocked out causality. There may be something left if causality falls, but no branch of science or philosophy offers us any tools to analyze it.
If FTL is not possible, then the more advanced our communication and computation and HCI become, the less motivation we have to move even beyond low orbit. Think of how gamers whine about hundred-millisecond ping times today. Now imagine continuous, fine-grained, fully-integrated access to post-Google at the pre-conscious level -- and imagine that suddenly half your thoughts are experiencing multi-second latency. Not even the most inveterate stoner would be eager to tolerate that sort of impairment.
And the idea of traveling to another solar system? It would amount to forking reality, with the travelers effectively removing themselves from Earth's consensus universe forever.
Well, I'd like for it to be burrows or casings...
What sort of progress? Oh, I don't know -- perhaps the six-order-of-magnitude increase in memory size, or the four-order-of-magnitude increase in processing speed, or the one-order-of-magnitude-plus reduction in weight, or the two-order-of-magnitude reduction in volume, or...
Look, if what you want is a machine with the power, storage, battery life, and durability of the PC8201a, we can easily hook you up. Of course, you're going to pay for it, because there's no economy of scale in manufacturing it -- nobody wants a machine with those specifications, unless it's in the wristwatch form-factor, and dedicated to a fairly simple task. I'm guessing that a heart-rate monitor is a pretty close match.
I seem to remember reading (decades ago) about people successfully grafting tomato plants onto hemp root stock, and getting THC-bearing foliage. Guess it was a false report, though, or by now it would be pretty widespread.
I'm still not clear on why these plant structures are necessary for production of the chemical, as opposed to concentration. But that's not surprising, as I'm no sort of biologist.
Well, most ionic liquids are expensive. Not all, though -- you can make one with a eutectic mix of choline chloride and urea that's liquid at room temperature, and the components are available for pennies per kilogram. (Choline chloride is chicken feed, and urea is a bulk fertilizer.)
I'm sure a semiconductor manufacturer wouldn't be using anything so mundane. Then again, they'd probably be using micrograms at most per chip.
No, no, no. You're supposed to ditch your old-fashioned, behind-the-times collaborators and start hanging out with the cool kids. "Work" and "substance" are totes last-century.
So, heart attacks go up by 10% in the wake of spring-forward, but fall by 10% in the wake of fall-back? The solution is clear, then -- we need to adopt an official 25-hour day.
The twice-yearly clock shift really is a silly, silly exercise. Not so silly as a uniform, one-size-fits-all, year-around schedule for work, school, and entertainment, but silly all the same.
Pulse dialing actually cost the phone company more for a long time, as I understand it, because it kept the switching circuitry busy longer than tone dialing. But they'd won the right to charge extra for tone dialing, and the more people shifted to tone dialing (for its obvious benefits), the more money they could get.
My wife and I were also holdouts, keeping our cheap electronic phones set to pulse-dial (hit "speed dial 8", then wait for the clickety-clicking to finish), switching to tone-dial as needed for voicemail. Even if it wasn't worth spending a few extra seconds a day to save a few extra cents a day, it was worth it to us to deny the phone company those ill-gotten cents.
And if you had ignored all the people who said "you can't do that" or "it won't work" or "no one has ever done that", you... probably wouldn't have survived grad school in chemistry. Or, for that matter, driver's education.
Sometimes, when everybody says you're wrong, it's because you're wrong.
You never know how far you go until you finish failing.
I don't know how far you're going to go with this.
Electrically reinforcing molecular bonds?
Unfortunately, no. But it does look at least a bit more interesting than "electrostatic attraction draws the film upward", which was what i guessed before reading the linked articles.
For a given budget, you can field a whole lot more drones than manned vehicles. Even if they have to be continuously teleoperated, drone controllers are a lot cheaper than pilots, and drones are a lot cheaper to operate than manned vehicles.
I expect that before the end of the decade every squad car will carry multiple drones. This horse is out of sight of the barn.
MPW
ParcPlace (?) Smalltalk
Lightspeed/Think C
Hypercard
I did a project or two on Mac Common LISP, but I don't even remember whether that was an IDE or not. It's been a looooong time.
Even earlier than that, I used some Pascal dev environment on the TRS-80, but I don't think you could call it an IDE. Not much room for integration in 48K.
You show me a computer that can translate poetry (or even literary prose) properly and I'll believe you.
What? "Speech recognition" doesn't exist until "automatic poetry transliteration" is perfected? Sorry, I'm getting too old for all this goalpost-chasing.
It's not a question of whether something turns out to be a breakthrough, it's whether you can legitimately describe it as an "invention" rather than "a series of technological improvements in various fields culminating in X".
Here, I can't even tell whether we're moving goalposts or begging questions. Or maybe it's those darned Scotsmen again. Regardless, the post to which I responded tried to characterize a list of technologies as "largely market breakthroughs". I wanted to point out what I saw as flaws in that characterization. I'll grant that this may be getting a bit far afield from the original article's points.
I'd say many of these these are largely market breakthroughs, the application of an existing technology to a new market. If anything, with the exception of the Internet, these demonstrate the article's point.
7. Speech recognition. Computerized version of break audio into components, looking them up in a translation table, and report results.
8. Automatic language translation. Computerized version of looking something up in a translation table and reporting results.
Wow. Just wow. You really have no idea what actually goes into natural-language recognition and translation. For starters, we've been able to "break audio into components and look them up in a translation table" for, oh, fifty or sixty years now. Speech recognition was "ten years away" for the first thirty or forty of those years. Now, it's basically arrived, although there's still plenty to be done.
What made it possible? Partly, it was these last four or five orders of magnitude of improvement in processor speed and memory size. But there's also a colossal amount of research in signal processing, statistical analysis, and AI that you're simply sweeping under the rug.
By the same reasoning you applied to these points, the Internet is even less of a "breakthrough" -- it's a simple iterative advance stemming from more numerous and widely-used computers, better data-transmission technology, and new market demand. Except that it's anything but "simple", and the "iterations" that led to it took us over a precipice. On this side of the precipice, everything is different.
When you come right down to it, every invention is an "iterative advance" based on pre-existing technology, simply because you can't really base an invention on technology that doesn't exist yet, and because you can't take infinite steps. So, your observation may be technically valid, but I don't think it's useful.
Nearly everybody needs at least some degree of both luck and hard work to succeed. It's easy to point to folks who show little evidence of hard work, but there are certainly counterexamples -- I'd say Ping Fu is one.
Yep, it's all coming together. As It Was Foretold.
Seems like a bomb blast would alter the level of everything in the brain. Of course, those levels should stabilize within a few seconds, with final values determined by the heights of the surfaces they land on.
Expialidocious.
I believe you need to go back and reread that particular fable. The Boy who Cried Wolf eventually was ignored by everyone else -- and then, when a real wolf came along, they ignored his warning.
The story is, of course, a warning against habitual lying for attention. But it can also be viewed as a cautionary tale against the easy ad-hominem dismissal.
And with wireless connectivity, the contents could be interactive and collaborative. Just the thing for a Young Lady.
I seriously hope this is not the model flexible-display producers adopt. Yeah, you get some advantages from a bound stack -- quick rough navigation, coarse physical bookmarking -- but you lose the ability to spread a selection of sheets out on a desk. On the other hand, if it's easy to drag a copy of a page onto the desk, which itself is a display surface... nah, the microtransaction fees would kill you.
More speech like, say, publicizing identities and contact information?
...keep your velocity higher than 80% or so of c. If your velocity drops below the velocity of light in the repelling surface, the Cherenkov radiation goes away, there's no more repulsion, and you land on the surface cruising at .5c or so. Hope the tires on your landing gear are properly inflated.
Actually, now that I think about it, you'd probably get plenty of backup lift from the relativistic plasma formerly constituting the repulsive surface and the bottom of your vehicle. I withdraw my objection.
This is my new favorite euphemism of the day.
Seriously, how long are we going to keep feeding this poor nutcase's attention habit?
Should be easier than that. Set up multiple concentric focus zones -- we've got contacts like that already for "bifocal" use -- and dynamically black out all zones but the one you want to use. It wouldn't work especially well in bright light, though, where your pupil is contracted, because you'd only be "seeing through" the central zone anyhow.