The moment you limit liberties for the "general good" you're falling into the trap of tyrants and dictators.
I know this doesn't technically meet the definition of "Godwin's Law", but it's very close.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Like most people who quote this statement, you're begging the definitions of "a little", "temporary", and "essential". In this particular case, dying of pertussis or going blind due to measles is pretty damn permanent.
Ah, my mistake. I didn't realize his house had 400-mile ceilings. (186000 miles/sec, divided by 240 half-cycles per second to map maximum to minimum-intensity phase, divided by 2 because it's a round trip.)
There is no way that bouncing light off the walls can reduce flicker, unless the flicker is in the megahertz range (in which case it WILL NOT be perceptible), or the walls are coated with a phosphor that has significant persistence. (And even in that case, the light isn't "bouncing" off the walls, but being absorbed and re-emitted.)
In fact, if GGP's golden eyes were truly that sensitive to flicker, I'd expect bouncing the light off the ceiling to make things worse, because then the flickering light would completely fill his peripheral vision, which of course is far more sensitive than central vision to flicker and motion.
I see a flicker from florescent lights. CFLs and bar style. Bugs the crap out of me. Had to switch to torchiere style lights so it at least bounces off the ceiling first.
Um, what does "bouncing it off the ceiling" do to reduce flicker?
So I think what you're saying is that, should humanity suddenly find itself in a situation where LSD is pervasive in the environment, you would actually be more fit than the rest of us, right?
What we really need to simulate in faster-than-realtime is the brain processes for optimizing this model. Once we can do that, things should click along nicely./p>
It seems like you're confusing Pu-239, which is used in weapons and has a half-life of 24000 years, with Pu-238, which is not used in weapons and has a half-life of around 90 years.
The focus would be way off though (always at close to infinity, no matter how close the surrounding really is). I can't even guess at what that does to your brain when you're using it for more than a few minutes.
The Google glasses don't have this issue, but they do have the problem that you have to switch focus to look at the overlay, which is probably pretty uncomfortable as well.
Finally, a case where technology will favor the middle-aged over the young. Our eyes have already lost most of their ability to adjust focus, so we should no longer suffer ill effects from vergence-accommodation conflict.
And that's a real shame because, as NASA discovered many years back, with near 100% FOV coverage something really cool happens - your brain decides that your eyes are more reliable than your inner ear, and you start actually *feeling* the motion that you're seeing.
Well, part of my brain decides that. Unfortunately, when that part secedes and declares war on the parts that are still trusting my inner ear, it's my digestive system that suffers the most collateral damage. I found this out the hard way after 20 minutes or so in a CAVE -- persistent motion sickness for the rest of the afternoon.
Between the time that VR is widely adopted in the working world, and the time that we develop good vestibular transducers to sync up balance with visual inputs, I'm going to have one heck of an occupational disability.
I tried out a retinal projection display at a SIGGRAPH conference many years ago. I was surprised and disappointed by the experience.
I'm not an optical scientist, but as best I understand it, retinal-scanning displays simulate a lens with a very high F-number (very small aperture). The good news is that aberrations in your own lens don't make much difference -- even if you need glasses for normal vision, you don't need them with this display technology. The bad news is that you get massive diffraction artifacts from the things that normally cause nearly-unnoticeable "floaters" in your field of view. They show up as big, bright-and-dark blobs in a monochrome system; depending on how a color system is arranged, I guess they could get pretty psychedelic.
This was maybe fifteen years ago, and I'm sure aspects of the technology have improved since then -- it'll be less bulky now, with higher resolution, and probably full color. But I'm not sure there's any way around these optical artifacts, at least without giving up the "infinite-focus" feature. I'd welcome input from others who are more in touch with the current state of the art.
If it takes 10-20 years to get this improvement it's not what I call rapid progress.
In 1947 Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. 1953 first supersonic fighters (USSR and USA). In 1961 Yuri Gagarin orbited the planet. In 1969 the USA landed people on the moon AND got them back safely. In 1969 we got Concorde and the 747 jumbo jet. That's rapid progress.
And to continue your analogy, that rapid progress in transportation technology is what allowed us to fulfill everyone's dream of flying cars and Moon vacations by the year 2000. Right?
It's also what made space transportation so very "practical and safe", as exemplified by Challenger and Columbia.
Some technologies progress by slow, incremental refinement. Some progress by leaps and bounds. Some progress by one-off stunts, done once (or a few times) and then not repeated for decades.
I don't pretend to understand all the factors that determine these paths. But I'm pretty sure that our heedless, exponential advances in computation (and "iPhone apps") have a lot to do with the fiery explosions and mass casualties we don't get when a new game turns out to have a flaw. You can push harder when the risk is lower.
For medical technology, lives are very much at risk, and so we take the slow, carefully-policed path. It's frustrating for those of us who await the final product, but how many people are you willing to maim or kill in order to speed things up?
This. Remember the Cray-1 supercomputer? $5-10 million, 100KW power draw. The standard against which other systems were compared through the early 80's.
This card provides more than ten thousand times the computational power, using less than one-half percent the electrical power.
Sure, we've already spent so much money to get the system working 99% of the time. Why not spend the 1% more that it would take to get it working 100% of the time? Heck, spend 2% more, and get it working 101% of the time! Sometimes, you don't even have to dial!
There were reports in the last year or so that Asperger's folks tended to fixate on the mouth, not the eyes, during conversation. This immediately made me self-conscious of doing the same thing.
Not, of course, that all D&D players have Asperger's. Or that fixating on a monster's eyes vs. mouth correlates with fixating on a person's eyes vs. mouth. Or that, to those with Asperger's, it's unusually difficult to distinguish people from monsters.
I scanned through various product pages, and couldn't find anything about display resolution. I'm not interested in sitting through videos. Can anybody summarize some actual specifications?
It is completely ridiculous to think that life on Mars would use "DNA" and even "cells." Both are just coincidences of life on earth. There are an infinity of different ways to encode genetic information and assemble living organisms.
Illustrate your point with at least two other examples.
David R. Palmer, Emergence. I was pretty put off by the repeated "but then things got even more ridiculously over-the-top terrible for Our Hero, but then Our Hero sprouted an even more awesome superpower to overcome it!" -- the whole novel was pretty breathless that way. All the same, I enjoyed it, and I was always a little sad that he never followed through with the rest of the planned trilogy.
Slashdot Mirror
Glare is not flicker.
Improving the spatial distribution of the light has no perceptible temporal effect -- again, unless you're working at geographic distance scales.
The moment you limit liberties for the "general good" you're falling into the trap of tyrants and dictators.
I know this doesn't technically meet the definition of "Godwin's Law", but it's very close.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Like most people who quote this statement, you're begging the definitions of "a little", "temporary", and "essential". In this particular case, dying of pertussis or going blind due to measles is pretty damn permanent.
What's "impossible" about eight million people each spending ten minutes at a pointless exercise?
There are plenty of reasons to disregard EULAs. "It's literally impossible to read it" is not one of them.
Ah, my mistake. I didn't realize his house had 400-mile ceilings. (186000 miles/sec, divided by 240 half-cycles per second to map maximum to minimum-intensity phase, divided by 2 because it's a round trip.)
There is no way that bouncing light off the walls can reduce flicker, unless the flicker is in the megahertz range (in which case it WILL NOT be perceptible), or the walls are coated with a phosphor that has significant persistence. (And even in that case, the light isn't "bouncing" off the walls, but being absorbed and re-emitted.)
In fact, if GGP's golden eyes were truly that sensitive to flicker, I'd expect bouncing the light off the ceiling to make things worse, because then the flickering light would completely fill his peripheral vision, which of course is far more sensitive than central vision to flicker and motion.
I see a flicker from florescent lights. CFLs and bar style. Bugs the crap out of me. Had to switch to torchiere style lights so it at least bounces off the ceiling first.
Um, what does "bouncing it off the ceiling" do to reduce flicker?
So I think what you're saying is that, should humanity suddenly find itself in a situation where LSD is pervasive in the environment, you would actually be more fit than the rest of us, right?
Ah, yes, "weak superhumanity".
What we really need to simulate in faster-than-realtime is the brain processes for optimizing this model. Once we can do that, things should click along nicely./p>
It seems like you're confusing Pu-239, which is used in weapons and has a half-life of 24000 years, with Pu-238, which is not used in weapons and has a half-life of around 90 years.
On the bright side (ahem), there's a lot of solar energy available for running plasma thrusters. Or roll out a big solar-sail parachute.
wat
Nobody particularly cares about radiation if they're sitting at the bottom of a 50-km-deep, 700 Kelvin, 90-bar autoclave.
The focus would be way off though (always at close to infinity, no matter how close the surrounding really is). I can't even guess at what that does to your brain when you're using it for more than a few minutes.
The Google glasses don't have this issue, but they do have the problem that you have to switch focus to look at the overlay, which is probably pretty uncomfortable as well.
Finally, a case where technology will favor the middle-aged over the young. Our eyes have already lost most of their ability to adjust focus, so we should no longer suffer ill effects from vergence-accommodation conflict.
And that's a real shame because, as NASA discovered many years back, with near 100% FOV coverage something really cool happens - your brain decides that your eyes are more reliable than your inner ear, and you start actually *feeling* the motion that you're seeing.
Well, part of my brain decides that. Unfortunately, when that part secedes and declares war on the parts that are still trusting my inner ear, it's my digestive system that suffers the most collateral damage. I found this out the hard way after 20 minutes or so in a CAVE -- persistent motion sickness for the rest of the afternoon.
Between the time that VR is widely adopted in the working world, and the time that we develop good vestibular transducers to sync up balance with visual inputs, I'm going to have one heck of an occupational disability.
I tried out a retinal projection display at a SIGGRAPH conference many years ago. I was surprised and disappointed by the experience.
I'm not an optical scientist, but as best I understand it, retinal-scanning displays simulate a lens with a very high F-number (very small aperture). The good news is that aberrations in your own lens don't make much difference -- even if you need glasses for normal vision, you don't need them with this display technology. The bad news is that you get massive diffraction artifacts from the things that normally cause nearly-unnoticeable "floaters" in your field of view. They show up as big, bright-and-dark blobs in a monochrome system; depending on how a color system is arranged, I guess they could get pretty psychedelic.
This was maybe fifteen years ago, and I'm sure aspects of the technology have improved since then -- it'll be less bulky now, with higher resolution, and probably full color. But I'm not sure there's any way around these optical artifacts, at least without giving up the "infinite-focus" feature. I'd welcome input from others who are more in touch with the current state of the art.
We haven't actually come very far. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interface#Prominent_research_successes
If it takes 10-20 years to get this improvement it's not what I call rapid progress.
In 1947 Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. 1953 first supersonic fighters (USSR and USA). In 1961 Yuri Gagarin orbited the planet. In 1969 the USA landed people on the moon AND got them back safely. In 1969 we got Concorde and the 747 jumbo jet. That's rapid progress.
And to continue your analogy, that rapid progress in transportation technology is what allowed us to fulfill everyone's dream of flying cars and Moon vacations by the year 2000. Right?
It's also what made space transportation so very "practical and safe", as exemplified by Challenger and Columbia.
Some technologies progress by slow, incremental refinement. Some progress by leaps and bounds. Some progress by one-off stunts, done once (or a few times) and then not repeated for decades.
I don't pretend to understand all the factors that determine these paths. But I'm pretty sure that our heedless, exponential advances in computation (and "iPhone apps") have a lot to do with the fiery explosions and mass casualties we don't get when a new game turns out to have a flaw. You can push harder when the risk is lower.
For medical technology, lives are very much at risk, and so we take the slow, carefully-policed path. It's frustrating for those of us who await the final product, but how many people are you willing to maim or kill in order to speed things up?
I don't know, but Archimedes came awfully damned close to inventing it, despite his culture's lack of essential background concepts.
This. Remember the Cray-1 supercomputer? $5-10 million, 100KW power draw. The standard against which other systems were compared through the early 80's.
This card provides more than ten thousand times the computational power, using less than one-half percent the electrical power.
The future really is a cool place.
"Make Trolls Stay On-Topic"
..so maybe it's a mini-Mesklin?
"...be a shame if something happened to it."
Sure, we've already spent so much money to get the system working 99% of the time. Why not spend the 1% more that it would take to get it working 100% of the time? Heck, spend 2% more, and get it working 101% of the time! Sometimes, you don't even have to dial!
There were reports in the last year or so that Asperger's folks tended to fixate on the mouth, not the eyes, during conversation. This immediately made me self-conscious of doing the same thing.
Not, of course, that all D&D players have Asperger's. Or that fixating on a monster's eyes vs. mouth correlates with fixating on a person's eyes vs. mouth. Or that, to those with Asperger's, it's unusually difficult to distinguish people from monsters.
I scanned through various product pages, and couldn't find anything about display resolution. I'm not interested in sitting through videos. Can anybody summarize some actual specifications?
It is completely ridiculous to think that life on Mars would use "DNA" and even "cells." Both are just coincidences of life on earth. There are an infinity of different ways to encode genetic information and assemble living organisms.
Illustrate your point with at least two other examples.
David R. Palmer, Emergence. I was pretty put off by the repeated "but then things got even more ridiculously over-the-top terrible for Our Hero, but then Our Hero sprouted an even more awesome superpower to overcome it!" -- the whole novel was pretty breathless that way. All the same, I enjoyed it, and I was always a little sad that he never followed through with the rest of the planned trilogy.
Or in 1980, when John Anderson ran against Carter and Reagan, and debated them?