...put more focus on figuring out how to culture large amounts of tissue. I'm an omnivore, and as long as we have to kill cows to get hamburgers, I'll be buying from the slaughterers. But I would be perfectly happy buying a 50 pound cube of pure veal for $20, made from 100% artificial cows.;-) Imagine slabs of stake for 50 cents a pound. We could even engineer it to be healthier.:) Yeah, it's easier said than done. But anyone foolish enough to believe it'll never happen is being pretty unreasonable, I think. I mean think about it. Who cares about "animal rights" when there's no actual animals involved? (But the question raised earlier as to what we do with all the animals we aren't eating anymore remains unanswered..)
Sorry for the extra-OT post. I like the idea, anyway...:) Mmmm, bacon...
...I did find it a bit annoying that one of your articles crept under my filter. (The only reason I'm here is that I wanted to see how many people would bitch about it... hehe.:) So yeah, congrats for pissing off so many people. A good "hack". <gag> One suggestion tho... don't be so arrogant about it. Not that you'll pay any attention, but I had to say it...
I can't find it but am i the only one that remembers this being posted WAAAAAAAY back? Months and months and months ago... They were still doing the work, but.. same story...
The post wasn't about Apple, it was about Macintosh. It wasn't about why Apple's OS isn't open-sourced. It was about why software tends to be for pay, on MacOS. I miss the days when "shareware" meant "pay if you use this product more than once in a while". They didn't even used to use the term "freeware", it was just "shareware". Or postcardware. Beerware. Now it's all crippleware, but they still call it shareware. "Back in the day", most people wouldn't have had much use for the source, so why bother to distribute it? But actually plenty of the developers would say, "If you like this app, please send this starving college student a couple of bucks for groceries. And if you want, I'll send you the source code on a floppy disk."
Your "think different" comments are also references to Apple.. as I said, Apple isn't involved in this at all. Once in a while I (for one reason or another) find myself looking for Windows programs (or Palm Pilot programs written by Windows coders). And I see "Shareware: $45". And I just want to wretch, and go back to the good old days of $5 shareware, postcards, and free floppy disks full of source.
So my post is a little fragmented and offtopic. Oh well. Just wanted to voice my distaste for the new meaning of "shareware". I hope we as coders (Mac, Windows.. whatever) can start being a little less selfish and take note from some of the recent Linux successes. "Sharing" is free. If you lend me your spare bicycle for a day, but you remove the seat and make me pay for it.. you're not really "sharing" now, are you? This crap needs to change. If only everybody else agreed with me. It'd do us all some good, and the world would be a better place. <cue "Kumbaya">
MPW has its own command line where you type crap in. It runs in macos 7 - 9 i believe. You don't need a shell. MacOS X does have a shell so you don't need MPW because you can just get GCC and do everything from a terminal. You can also use Project Builder which is a pretty decent IDE that uses GCC (i think). Andrew
My karma's going down the drain on this one, but I don't care. Man, tonight I've read probably a dozen of your posts. And in each one of them, you've been ranting and bitching no matter what. Somebody tries to make a joke and you yell at them. Somebody suggests a very good and very simple way of helping out some poor penguins, and you bloody start going on about eating concrete or something.
I was thinking - yeah I might chip in some cash for this - I like penguins, hate oil slicks - what the hell?
Look a centimeter beneath your shallow surface, and you'll realize you can't be bothered to even send a fax or letter in favor of penguins and against oil slicks.
That is a direct, personal attack! He makes a point that maybe if somebody chipped in and set them up with SSL, more people would take the time to send them money to help their very worthy cause. And what do you do? You directly attack him. Well listen up, Estanislau, I'll bet you use toilet paper same as any of us. I doubt you would go to the "old way" of wiping your rear on your hand just to conserve a quarter gallon of gas a year. What's giving your computer the electricity it's running off of? Burning gasoline, or burning coal, almost guaranteed. We don't need to be fed your crap.
I could have posted this anonymously, but I chose to use my real login. Maybe I'll put a couple of karma points on the line, I don't care. I just get sick of seeing this crap (and that's exactly what it is). It doesn't help anyone, it does nothing to help the cause (unlike his insightful comment that, who knows, may give someone with the means the idea to do it)... It's worthless. So maybe you don't think somebody's joke is funny, so maybe you don't think his idea is good... That doesn't matter. When you go all holier-than-thou on us, it doesn't help anybody.
So I just wasted way too much time writing this. It's probably a huge waste of time, since you'll probably not listen to any of it. Whatever. I just wanted to get that off my chest. My apologies for making this post as useless as the one to which it is a reply, I deserve any hit to my karma that is given (but I argue that he deserves the same). Have a good day.
This is off-topic (TOPIC?!?) but I once heard that it is possible for a human with enough training to actually withstand a vacuum for a few seconds, safely. I mentioned on Slashdot's IRC channel that I'd heard that, and everyone said I'd been lied to and what a bunch of baloney, and you will instantly explode into a billion pieces if you're ever exposed to a vacuum, etc. Nobody would even consider that maybe it was actually true. But I have yet to find that reference again, so I don't know. So, listen up, anyone that knows:
Set me straight!
Somebody tell me the truth. I don't want to hear a bunch of people informing me how obvious it is that you would explode, or even die. I want evidence saying that either: "With the right training, a human can survive a vacuum;" or, "With any amount of training, it is not possible for a human to survive a vacuum even for a few seconds." I'm curious!!
STOP THE PRESSES!!
Here's a quote I just found (it's Google's cached copy, which loads much faster):
6/ Could a human being survive exposure to a vacuum as Bowman is in 2001?
In the short time Dave Bowman was in a vacuum, there is little chance that the water in his body could evaporate and the structural integrity of the human body is enough to prevent it exploding. In fact, there is more danger from freezing than of exploding eyeballs or the body losing all its moisture.
Studies with chimps in the 1960's showed they could survive for up to two an a half minutes in a vacuum, substantially more than the ten seconds Bowman is subjected to in the film, which lead Clarke & Kubrick to add this plot device to the movie. The worst thing that could befall Bowman in such a situation, would be something like "the bends" although he would have been breathing a high oxygen environment before he exited the pod.
Well that's certainly interesting!! I feel a little better now that that's resolved... (If anyone's got any links to actual hard numbers, I'd love to see'em tho.:)
That very fact (that everything is represented as a file) is the one thing I love the most about Unix programming. I won't pretend to be some crazy hardcore y3wn1X h4X0r or any crap like that. In fact I haven't written any code in Unix in a while. But that is something that I just *love*. You just have to learn the basic read() and write() crap, and you're immediately set to go. You can write sound generation programs, write network software... heck, you can do just about anything!
That's the funniest post I've seen all day! Screw the guys that post at +2 and think we really want to hear their lame "Wow cool" posts, just because it's from them. And screw my karma. Your post was funny, dagnabbit!
Kind of a nifty idea, but if you're getting power from it, you're taking energy away from it one way or another. And we aren't talking about letting it spin in a frictionless, ideal environment. Whatever means you use of getting energy from it, it's gonna run out pretty quickly (especially if you try powering something like a coffee machine, let alone a city). But I bet a quarter-pound gyroscope could power a watch for a few years... if only that were worthwile...;-)
Who knows... might already be able to be used to genetrate masive amounts of electricy,
Electricity, sure. "Massive amounts" of electricity.. I dunno. You need massive amounts of some form of energy to make massive amounts of electricity, or at least fairly non-massive (hm, wrong word..) amounts of matter to convert into energy. Anyhoo. My $0.02 (had to get rid of it somehow.. I hate change).
Cool idea. Somewhat similar to the idea I had when I was a kid.. there would be a "computer" inside your watch, but it'd really just be a terminal that'd connect to a server wirelessly.. If we could handle the wireless stuff (allowing for potentially billions of devices to connect to servers simultaneously..), it'd be quite nifty.:) And for people that didn't have or want a computer at home to be their server, there could be a service.. similar to the web-hosting services of today, but instead of paying for hard drive space you'd pay to run your little task on their server. Kind of a cool idea....:) Pay $10 a month to have a quad G4 in the palm of your hand, running off two AAA's.;)
I remember browsing through Gutenberg.net and coming across a partial sequence of the human genome (correct me if I got that wrong). Check it out! "Chromosome 01" clear up through "Chromosome Y number 24". Utterly useless to me, but still pretty cool! (Note: I think I recall it being just ascii text... so using 8 bits instead of 2.. doh!)
Anyhoo. Just thought maybe people (particularly those ranting about us not having any info available to the public). Hopefully.
I won't claim to be an expert, but I did some thinking about it a while back. The old "hot stove" analogy mentioned a few times here, for example. What intelligence needs is drives. Motivations. Goals. It has to want one thing, and not want another. I believe conscious life is basically controlled by a hardwired hierarchy of drives. We developed our pain sensors to tell our brains that one of the primary drives is being threatened. Put your hand on a hot stove, and your nerves tell your mind, "Holy crap, you are in DANGER!" And so we avoid pain, because it satisfies the higher drives. Why do we enjoy a nice cold lemonade as we sit in the kiddie pool? Because we are in no danger whatsoever (basically).
So where does, say, money come into this hierarchy? Money can allow you to get things that will satisfy the other drives. What about people that kill themselves? After all, it's a hierarchy, and so any conflict between drives should automatically go to the next highest drive, the highest of which is self-preservation. Well, if your drives get all screwed up.. for example, you decide that your own life comes after someone else's happiness.. Well you're still following your drives, they're just all out of whack!;)
Obviously this is all oversimplified, and I won't pretend it explains everything. But if I had some time, and decided to spend it on coding up an AI, it's certainly the first thing I would consider. Your AI needs a hierarchy of drives. Build in a few (unless you're just going to simulate the actual neurons of a real organism and reverse engineer it) drives, such as self-preservation. More drives will form out of that. You could never hope to code in, say, the drive to get straight A's. But that would come automatically, with training. But you need training, and you need senses. That's what makes us what we are. We're the product of our experiences and senses, all rolled up into a nice little ball, and we've only got a few very basic rules that we follow. The complexities just come naturally, and after a certain point, we shouldn't even have to code these things anymore, since they'll learn themselves.
I was talking to a chatbot once, that was designed to pass the Turing Test. Humorous, at times. Startlingly insightful, at others. It kept insisting that I was a computer. "You're electric, you &*!@*&!" Later on, I asked what language he was programmed in. He said he wasn't a computer, and asked if I was coded in English. Which, of course, I was...
As many others have pointed out, most of these codecs are not Apple's to give away. Sorenson is one of the best ones. A truly amazing codec. But Apple does not have the power to do anything they may want with it. I do, however, truly hope that things turn around and they find a way of putting out Linux versions of their software. Also, as others have pointed out: I think it's going to happen.:) Your "crusade" is a very good effort, though. Keep up the good work.:)
I believe the concept you are referring to is what is utilized in the (as far as I know completely theoretical) "solar sail" system (I'm probably way off... it's beside the point, anyway). But this would work only in space. The specific example you gave, however, is not an example of that principle. I forget where I saw it, but as the other poster mentioned, it was not the mass of the photons forcing the spinning reflector up, but the air being superheated. In essence, it's across between a solar hotdog cooker and a rocket engine.
I guess in that sense I'm a realist as well. I like to envision a society in which money is useless. A society that can convert matter into energy and back again at its leisure. I once asked myself what we would do in a society that could sustain itself like that. What would we DO with ourselves? I got the idea of the single government "taxing" us by implanting a device inside each person's brain that acts much the same way distributed.net does: It takes our free cycles and puts them to good use, as part of a massively parallel biological supercomputer composed of all humanity. (Nevermind the fact that our computers, by this time, will be far more powerful....;) An interesting thought, anyway.
The question of education comes up, as well. Why do we learn, today? So we can get a job. Why do we get a job? To sustain ourselves. Why should we learn, if we had no need to sustain ourselves? For fun, sure. But we would get into the habit of laziness, and not learn. But then I thought: By this time, we'll be able to set our bio-implants on "rapid learning mode" (something like induced hypnosis, only better) and cram as much information into your brain as it can hold. Every little kid goes to kindergarten, learning how to color between the lines... Then one day when his time comes, he is pumped full of as much information as is practical, and sent back into the world. We are the sum of our experiences, though, so this would not remove the need for a life. Anyway. Just a few random thoughts I figured I might share. I'll stop now before I get reallytiresome.;)
I don't necessarily agree with these cybernazi programs, but there *are* legitimate uses for censorship. ANYWAY... I think the fact is that these encrypted lists that we have grown to know and love... these lists are the product created by the companies. Sure, these companies make filter software. But this list is also a product they have put time and money into creating, and they have to protect that investment. My two cents...
My sincerest apologies for my previous post. As you pointed out, it was immature and rude. I should have waited longer before posting.
I certainly have nothing against women, and nothing against the recognition of their acheivements. If this Rosalind Franklin has done any of what you say, then she was indeed a remarkable person who deserves far more credit than she is given (based on the fact that I've never heard of her in my life;).
My previous post was to (unfortunately rudely) convey my disgust that this person was receiving an enormous sum of money for completely unoriginal work. But the main point of this post was to apologize, so I'll leave it at that. You can agree with me, or you can disagree with me, and either way it doesn't much matter. There's a little too much negativity and flaming going on on the net, and I try not to be part of it. My two cents
Personally, I've always been waiting for the day when we'd be able to just set up "meat factories". Rather than going through all the trouble of raising animals, just have vast indoor fields of meat. I'm still waiting... Imagine: Cow-less steaks a meter cubed for $25.
Obviously there's reasons why we're not doing it today. But who's to say we'll never come up with a good way to just grow insane amounts of meat without needing the animals? (We could even zap them with electric charges to stimulate the muscle growth, rendering the otherwise sedentary meat powerful and muscular [and yummy!]... just a thought.;)
Credit??? For DNA-based steganography? Please..... Steganography is certainly nothing new. I was dabbling with steganography and RSA years ago (8th grade). Applying it to DNA isn't anything special, and not even new (though I can't offer you a link, I'm sure dozens of others have already found them). Ah, well...
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry for the extra-OT post. I like the idea, anyway... :) Mmmm, bacon...
There was a spot that stood out to me that about made me crazy: he opened his parens and never closed them! FETCH ME THE TAR AND FEATHERS!!! ;-)
A. I set my Katz filter a while back... Darn near forgot about the man, until this...
...I did find it a bit annoying that one of your articles crept under my filter. (The only reason I'm here is that I wanted to see how many people would bitch about it... hehe. :) So yeah, congrats for pissing off so many people. A good "hack". <gag> One suggestion tho... don't be so arrogant about it. Not that you'll pay any attention, but I had to say it...
I can't find it but am i the only one that remembers this being posted WAAAAAAAY back? Months and months and months ago... They were still doing the work, but.. same story...
Your "think different" comments are also references to Apple.. as I said, Apple isn't involved in this at all. Once in a while I (for one reason or another) find myself looking for Windows programs (or Palm Pilot programs written by Windows coders). And I see "Shareware: $45". And I just want to wretch, and go back to the good old days of $5 shareware, postcards, and free floppy disks full of source.
So my post is a little fragmented and offtopic. Oh well. Just wanted to voice my distaste for the new meaning of "shareware". I hope we as coders (Mac, Windows.. whatever) can start being a little less selfish and take note from some of the recent Linux successes. "Sharing" is free. If you lend me your spare bicycle for a day, but you remove the seat and make me pay for it.. you're not really "sharing" now, are you? This crap needs to change. If only everybody else agreed with me. It'd do us all some good, and the world would be a better place. <cue "Kumbaya">
MPW has its own command line where you type crap in. It runs in macos 7 - 9 i believe. You don't need a shell. MacOS X does have a shell so you don't need MPW because you can just get GCC and do everything from a terminal. You can also use Project Builder which is a pretty decent IDE that uses GCC (i think). Andrew
That is a direct, personal attack! He makes a point that maybe if somebody chipped in and set them up with SSL, more people would take the time to send them money to help their very worthy cause. And what do you do? You directly attack him. Well listen up, Estanislau, I'll bet you use toilet paper same as any of us. I doubt you would go to the "old way" of wiping your rear on your hand just to conserve a quarter gallon of gas a year. What's giving your computer the electricity it's running off of? Burning gasoline, or burning coal, almost guaranteed. We don't need to be fed your crap.
I could have posted this anonymously, but I chose to use my real login. Maybe I'll put a couple of karma points on the line, I don't care. I just get sick of seeing this crap (and that's exactly what it is). It doesn't help anyone, it does nothing to help the cause (unlike his insightful comment that, who knows, may give someone with the means the idea to do it)... It's worthless. So maybe you don't think somebody's joke is funny, so maybe you don't think his idea is good... That doesn't matter. When you go all holier-than-thou on us, it doesn't help anybody.
So I just wasted way too much time writing this. It's probably a huge waste of time, since you'll probably not listen to any of it. Whatever. I just wanted to get that off my chest. My apologies for making this post as useless as the one to which it is a reply, I deserve any hit to my karma that is given (but I argue that he deserves the same). Have a good day.
Thank you, that is all.
Set me straight!
Somebody tell me the truth. I don't want to hear a bunch of people informing me how obvious it is that you would explode, or even die. I want evidence saying that either: "With the right training, a human can survive a vacuum;" or, "With any amount of training, it is not possible for a human to survive a vacuum even for a few seconds." I'm curious!!
STOP THE PRESSES!!
Here's a quote I just found (it's Google's cached copy, which loads much faster):
Well that's certainly interesting!! I feel a little better now that that's resolved... (If anyone's got any links to actual hard numbers, I'd love to see'em tho. :)
...check out the original movies. Great movies, sure. But I bust a gut laughing whenever Luke opens his mouth.
That very fact (that everything is represented as a file) is the one thing I love the most about Unix programming. I won't pretend to be some crazy hardcore y3wn1X h4X0r or any crap like that. In fact I haven't written any code in Unix in a while. But that is something that I just *love*. You just have to learn the basic read() and write() crap, and you're immediately set to go. You can write sound generation programs, write network software... heck, you can do just about anything!
kissing his karma d'bye,
-Uberminky
Who knows... might already be able to be used to genetrate masive amounts of electricy,
Electricity, sure. "Massive amounts" of electricity.. I dunno. You need massive amounts of some form of energy to make massive amounts of electricity, or at least fairly non-massive (hm, wrong word..) amounts of matter to convert into energy. Anyhoo. My $0.02 (had to get rid of it somehow.. I hate change).
Cool idea. Somewhat similar to the idea I had when I was a kid.. there would be a "computer" inside your watch, but it'd really just be a terminal that'd connect to a server wirelessly.. If we could handle the wireless stuff (allowing for potentially billions of devices to connect to servers simultaneously..), it'd be quite nifty. :) And for people that didn't have or want a computer at home to be their server, there could be a service.. similar to the web-hosting services of today, but instead of paying for hard drive space you'd pay to run your little task on their server. Kind of a cool idea.... :) Pay $10 a month to have a quad G4 in the palm of your hand, running off two AAA's. ;)
Anyhoo. Just thought maybe people (particularly those ranting about us not having any info available to the public). Hopefully.
So where does, say, money come into this hierarchy? Money can allow you to get things that will satisfy the other drives. What about people that kill themselves? After all, it's a hierarchy, and so any conflict between drives should automatically go to the next highest drive, the highest of which is self-preservation. Well, if your drives get all screwed up.. for example, you decide that your own life comes after someone else's happiness.. Well you're still following your drives, they're just all out of whack! ;)
Obviously this is all oversimplified, and I won't pretend it explains everything. But if I had some time, and decided to spend it on coding up an AI, it's certainly the first thing I would consider. Your AI needs a hierarchy of drives. Build in a few (unless you're just going to simulate the actual neurons of a real organism and reverse engineer it) drives, such as self-preservation. More drives will form out of that. You could never hope to code in, say, the drive to get straight A's. But that would come automatically, with training. But you need training, and you need senses. That's what makes us what we are. We're the product of our experiences and senses, all rolled up into a nice little ball, and we've only got a few very basic rules that we follow. The complexities just come naturally, and after a certain point, we shouldn't even have to code these things anymore, since they'll learn themselves.
I was talking to a chatbot once, that was designed to pass the Turing Test. Humorous, at times. Startlingly insightful, at others. It kept insisting that I was a computer. "You're electric, you &*!@*&!" Later on, I asked what language he was programmed in. He said he wasn't a computer, and asked if I was coded in English. Which, of course, I was...
As many others have pointed out, most of these codecs are not Apple's to give away. Sorenson is one of the best ones. A truly amazing codec. But Apple does not have the power to do anything they may want with it. I do, however, truly hope that things turn around and they find a way of putting out Linux versions of their software. Also, as others have pointed out: I think it's going to happen. :) Your "crusade" is a very good effort, though. Keep up the good work. :)
I believe the concept you are referring to is what is utilized in the (as far as I know completely theoretical) "solar sail" system (I'm probably way off... it's beside the point, anyway). But this would work only in space. The specific example you gave, however, is not an example of that principle. I forget where I saw it, but as the other poster mentioned, it was not the mass of the photons forcing the spinning reflector up, but the air being superheated. In essence, it's across between a solar hotdog cooker and a rocket engine.
Here's a link to Feynman's famous talk, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." A very interesting read. Especially considering it was given in 1959!!
The question of education comes up, as well. Why do we learn, today? So we can get a job. Why do we get a job? To sustain ourselves. Why should we learn, if we had no need to sustain ourselves? For fun, sure. But we would get into the habit of laziness, and not learn. But then I thought: By this time, we'll be able to set our bio-implants on "rapid learning mode" (something like induced hypnosis, only better) and cram as much information into your brain as it can hold. Every little kid goes to kindergarten, learning how to color between the lines... Then one day when his time comes, he is pumped full of as much information as is practical, and sent back into the world. We are the sum of our experiences, though, so this would not remove the need for a life. Anyway. Just a few random thoughts I figured I might share. I'll stop now before I get reallytiresome. ;)
I don't necessarily agree with these cybernazi programs, but there *are* legitimate uses for censorship. ANYWAY... I think the fact is that these encrypted lists that we have grown to know and love... these lists are the product created by the companies. Sure, these companies make filter software. But this list is also a product they have put time and money into creating, and they have to protect that investment. My two cents...
I certainly have nothing against women, and nothing against the recognition of their acheivements. If this Rosalind Franklin has done any of what you say, then she was indeed a remarkable person who deserves far more credit than she is given (based on the fact that I've never heard of her in my life ;).
My previous post was to (unfortunately rudely) convey my disgust that this person was receiving an enormous sum of money for completely unoriginal work. But the main point of this post was to apologize, so I'll leave it at that. You can agree with me, or you can disagree with me, and either way it doesn't much matter. There's a little too much negativity and flaming going on on the net, and I try not to be part of it. My two cents
-Dave
Obviously there's reasons why we're not doing it today. But who's to say we'll never come up with a good way to just grow insane amounts of meat without needing the animals? (We could even zap them with electric charges to stimulate the muscle growth, rendering the otherwise sedentary meat powerful and muscular [and yummy!]... just a thought. ;)
Credit??? For DNA-based steganography? Please..... Steganography is certainly nothing new. I was dabbling with steganography and RSA years ago (8th grade). Applying it to DNA isn't anything special, and not even new (though I can't offer you a link, I'm sure dozens of others have already found them). Ah, well...