There shouldn't be a government of a few people telling the rest what to do and subjecting people to bad legislation from corruption and incompetence. Think of what could get accomplished if there were none of the three branches, simply a majority vote for what the people want the government to do in each region. Then there could be many advisory parties that are well educated in their field in order to suggest the best way to accomplish those desires. If a state government is implemented well enough, there would be much better prospects on freedom, as you could just move to avoid any laws that you happen to be the minority voter on.
This process will NOT "create" energy. In fact, I doubt it will have any more efficiency than the current conventional methods of turning trash into useful components. Keep in mind that vaporization of any solids from room temperature it going to take a massive amount of energy. Spinning turbines with the gasses until it condenses is an obvious step to take, but there is a lot of legislation that can be made to supplant the need for more technology. Just take a look at Germany. You can get a hefty fine for putting a can in the bio-degradable receptacle, but those guys have one helluva disposal system.
To tell you the truth I'm more afraid of the smug pollution it could cause. Imagine if George Clooney makes another speech! Good thing it doesn't run on farts.
There's so much information that I want to argue with you, however I have much to publish before I can get into much depth. What I will say though is that people have a discrete nature that can be "controlled" so to speak. You see, "mind control" has actually existed for quite some time now. The zombie like "mind control" that Hollywood portrays is actually body control, for controlling the mind is actually a matter of influencing a person based on his behavior (politicians do it regularly). Proof of this concept lies in Nazi Germany, and the surge of people suddenly acting against what you would expect to be the normal behavior of a human being. While people have a choice in what they do, that choice is based solely on outside influences and past experiences. If you leave a infant in solitary confinement with only nutrients to survive (sadly an extreme case of this situation has occurred), then that child will become a vegetable, or at best be reduced to the status of an animal. And a vegetable more or less has no will, not even a will of which to live. So human beings are actually "built up" from there experiences and the way that they are built up from the "nurture" aspect is the "nature" aspect. You may say that people lack fundamental axioms, but in fact the experiences of a human being develops or destroys these axioms on a regular basis.
The reason I brought up free will is because many religions hinge on this concept. They say that the choices you make decide your fate in the afterlife, however, wouldn't it be a sham if you did not actually have control over this situation? That's where the "free" in free will actually comes from. If you were destines to sin and go to hell since your birth, would you not have been created with the full knowledge that you would only suffer? That's where determinism comes into play. If you say there is an algorithm that implements "free" will, could that algorithm not be used to influence your every action? If your actions are predetermines and you can never escape them, then you may have a will, however that will is not "free". All your actions are solely based on outside stimulus (or lack thereof).
You can't prove that the very existence that your consciousness experiences is real, so how can you even start with god? And even if you prove that god is real, I'm pretty sure that any specific religion, that has been warped and twisted to meet someone's needs/wants, would suddenly be right. How much farther would you have to go to make sure he does/doesn't addresses himself as Allah, and wants you to beat women if they read? And going even further, how can you prove that there is such a thing as free will? Randomness doesn't cut it, because randomness is described as something that has no defined mechanism for its outcome, so there's is no telling whether a "random event" is just a mechanism that we are unable to measure properly (and thus unable to predict), but is still a well-defined mechanism that could even occur in a separate dimension/universe. Thus we are unable to prove even randomness (not to mention that randomness doesn't even mean you have a "free" will, it just means you have an unpredictable will). I'm sorry to burst so many bubbles, but we really can't even begin to answer these profound questions without the fundamentals, so please stop getting ahead of yourselves.
What's more funny is that most of these are aerobic exercises. Just play soccer or something. I hope these fail, because this only makes the art of "fun exercise" less social.
It sucks that there seem to be so many people that don't understand how impossible it is to prevent pirating with conventional technology (and it's always them that are in charge). The reason you can't win is because there will always be a way to circumvent the methods implemented, unless you want to utterly eliminate freedom on the internet or the freedom to purchase what technology you want. It's like the war between virus and anti virus, except the "enemy" has a MUCH greater incentive with MUCH more people supporting them. Making drugs illegal has only make an incentive to distribute them more, and pirating has become a market due to its illegality as well. Fighting harder will just make more of an incentive to start a pirating company that fights back more for profit. And fighting harder in this manner usually uses tax money, not money directly from the company.
Actually, when I played Morrowind I completely beet the game with alchemy and enchanting. The enchanting skill was so useful because if you killed a skeleton and put it into a cheap soul gem, you could make 10 damage fireballs rain like crazy, and the potions essentially kept you immortal. By the time I had high level enchanting, I could kill just about anything. All you had to do was keep a massive supply of rings on you. It was way too easy.
Even though I'm a big fan of the Elder Scrolls series, the voice actors weren't the only bone I had to pick. The team had a large dynamic engine that they could have taken more advantage of and didn't. Although the fighting was improved, it didn't feel very interactive (nor expansive). The way that could be improved is to integrate the classes a bit more. They gave you the feature to fight as a mage/fighter/rouge, but the system didn't demand nor support integration very much. Alchemy was the only skill that was really useful throughout all the classes, but a warrior never really had a great need to cast a fireball when his fighting was so much more effective. A wizard never really needed to sneak when invisibility was much more convenient. They should have made monsters that are more immune to certain tactics. For instance, a mage comes upon a vampire that has extraordinary hearing. Rather than casting a spell, you'll have to depend on your sneaking abilities to approach him. You cast a freezing spell that is useless on him and must throw a (potions should have been throwable) exploding potion to knock him back since fire is also useless, then you pull out your sword with copious amounts of poison on it to subdue him (your skill with a sword does not matter since the poison is so effective). Also, the physics engine could have more juice squeezed out of it. There should have been gravity gun telekinesis and the ability to pick things up and throw them. Imagine being ambushed by some nut in a bar and throwing a chair at him to knock him back for a stronger attack. Man that would have improved the game a lot.
Define "much." Because this country has many people that truly can't buy "much" "these days". As soon as there's an eminent war with a global super power (because anything shorter of one wouldn't merit this program), I'm pretty sure a lot of us are going to look back and say "I wish all that money was spent on stabilizing our economy and international relations rather than on big guns for the pricks that started this conflict."
This is exactly why it's so useless to prevent pirating of digital media. As long as the purchased information is streamed into an output device, it can be pirated. You don't even need software for it, as there can be hardware as such as monitors and speakers that can be rigged to record their output.
The United states could seriously use these for public transportation. Every time I go into a crowded parking lot I think, "right here lies enough resources to get one of those done." Can you imagine how convenient it would be to have smaller versions branch off and routed to homes for delivery and single person travel? You wouldn't even have to leave home for groceries, and daily travel would be shortened exponentially.
This is a very debatable subject and it varies with the game mechanics and the foresight of the designers. There are many games that get ruined by scamming and ksing, but there are many games that have very altruistic guilds set up. I remember in diablo 2, after I became well equipped on 2 characters, I set out to start a clan that helped out noobs. Eventually, we had a large group of people that had a lot of fun together. We would have the decently equiped lite sorcs do normal and nightmare rushes for many people, and the hammerdins would do hell and get hellforge. The runes would help the noobs a bit, and some of the rushed accounts were made into common accounts that any guild member could use. We only got a few well equipped, and only high ranking members could use those. But it was fun for the noobs to instantly try out a new build with decent equipment without having to build one up alone. Only a few accounts got stolen (there will always be a greedy person), but not so much was lost that we utterly lost trust. We even had inter-clan duels with mid level naked characters for fun. We did a bunch of clan tournaments and events that greatly enhanced the experience of the game to a point that no one could really do alone. Has anyone who played d2 ever done cow level and other quests with 8 summon necros? I only lagged out once and another member lagged out twice, but it was still VERY fun. Another fun event was naked cowing with 8 fire druids. The d-torches made for SOOOO much fire it was hilarious (we had mercs with infinity).
I know that a lot of people aren't taking this issue to heart, and a lot of people agree that relative to the university budget, this isn't a lot of money to be spent. However, people need to stop seeing this as a fraction of a large budget, and start seeing it for what it truly is. It isn't until the economy start to depreciate that people see the value of small numbers, and if they would have seen it earlier, it would be helping them out more in desperate times. Just last year, my university paid for Carlos Mencia to do some stand up. Apart from the fact that he's a terrible comedian that did the exact act that anyone can see on comedy central, I'm sure they spent somewhere in the area of the amount that it would cost to keep our multimillion dollar gymnasium a bit cooler for the rest of the year. When you waste that kind of money on something useless, you're not doing your job of keeping university priorities strait. What my university essentially said, is that it's important for some hack to tell everyone that Mexicans eat burritos, so we have to sacrifice comfort when working out. Hell, the robotics club could have used a fraction of that for a better processor on our land vehicle.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that this is actually a good thing? What blizzard is saying is that their massive team of elite game developers simply do not have the time to fit the enormous amount of content they want to put in. This means that there will most likely be 2 more WELL-WORTH games that follow the series coming out. I know how much I wanted to go to blizzard and say "can you make another?" when it came to the brood war expansion. If there were only campaigns that came with the expansions, then people would just pirate it and buy the cd-keys for cheep online. Chances are, the expansions will have more units/buildings, more areas, more neutral objects, and possibly new functions to the old units/buildings. And chances are each one will redefine the way the game is played, and lead to many more hours of good gaming, which is much more than you can say about a whole lot of other expansions.
I don't like replying to my own comment, but I felt that I should have been a bit more proficient (not just in my bad grammar and typos) in explaining that mathematics also has to evolve to take advantage of the quantum principles. As you can imagine, the field of "uncalculating" isn't very big, just as Boolean algebra wasn't so big before transistors. That is another factor in making quantum computers that will be incorporated into every-day use.
Actually, it doesn't matter how fast a classical computer operates, a quantum computer WILL go exponentially faster regardless. I researched quantum computers in a laureate report I did a few year back. Quantum computers are able to achieve a dual state as a result of calculations. Also, quantum computers operate on the mathematical principles of a unitary matrix. One of the properties of a unitary matrix is it's reversibility, so that any operation that can be perform can be "unperformed". So take the ability to reverse calculations and achieve more than one answer at once, and you can "unperform" at an exponential rate. For example, you have a matrix with an "and" gate. If you where to reverse the and gate on the value '0', superposition will allow you to get the answers '10', '01', and '00' all at the same time. This means that a 64-qubit computer and theoretically "unrun" 2^64 (more than the molecules in the universe) times faster than a 64-bit computer. Now that is just a simplified gist of things. I don't want any physicists saying "you forgot the Hademard gate etc." The process is much more elaborate, and much more prone to other factors.
Now as for you other comments: 1) quantum computers will be a better candidate for simulating AI on a common commercial scale, and 2) quantum computing already is possible. The discovery that will most likely be made is the ability to create a room-temperature equivalent of a Bose-Einstein condensate so that topological quantum computers (the most reliable model so far) can be fit onto something the size of a thumb.
Your statement is ironically close to the truth. Quantum computers actually function in parallel to conventional devices when it comes to the simple tasks that they perform, such as rendering intricate scenes, or estimating series values. What quantum computers are better at is taking advantage of quantum effects to exponentially outperform conventional computers at things such as factoring immense integers. They will most likely be used for decryption and quantum simulations, or other mathematically novel applications. In other words, it benefits businesses and scientists the most. They will most likely have commercial value in the future, but that is when they develop more uses for it, such as emulating the human mind to make ultra-realistic (if not realistic) AI. At the moment however, it is still in the computer equivalent stage of useless behemoth. Someone in some field will most likely make a huge discovery similar to the silicon transistors of the past, win a Nobel prize, and set the stage for a new revolution. Feels like a long way from now, but I'll probably be proved wrong.
China could just host a lot of the Olympic events in-doors. Then they can develop a better energy policy. Better use of everyone's resources. Besides, it's not like they have a democratic utopia. Just ration off energy and reduce pollution better that way.
Slashdot Mirror
There shouldn't be a government of a few people telling the rest what to do and subjecting people to bad legislation from corruption and incompetence. Think of what could get accomplished if there were none of the three branches, simply a majority vote for what the people want the government to do in each region. Then there could be many advisory parties that are well educated in their field in order to suggest the best way to accomplish those desires. If a state government is implemented well enough, there would be much better prospects on freedom, as you could just move to avoid any laws that you happen to be the minority voter on.
FTA:
It is self-sustaining after the initial electrical charge is used
Translation: not self-sustaining
This process will NOT "create" energy. In fact, I doubt it will have any more efficiency than the current conventional methods of turning trash into useful components. Keep in mind that vaporization of any solids from room temperature it going to take a massive amount of energy. Spinning turbines with the gasses until it condenses is an obvious step to take, but there is a lot of legislation that can be made to supplant the need for more technology. Just take a look at Germany. You can get a hefty fine for putting a can in the bio-degradable receptacle, but those guys have one helluva disposal system.
To tell you the truth I'm more afraid of the smug pollution it could cause. Imagine if George Clooney makes another speech! Good thing it doesn't run on farts.
There's so much information that I want to argue with you, however I have much to publish before I can get into much depth. What I will say though is that people have a discrete nature that can be "controlled" so to speak. You see, "mind control" has actually existed for quite some time now. The zombie like "mind control" that Hollywood portrays is actually body control, for controlling the mind is actually a matter of influencing a person based on his behavior (politicians do it regularly). Proof of this concept lies in Nazi Germany, and the surge of people suddenly acting against what you would expect to be the normal behavior of a human being. While people have a choice in what they do, that choice is based solely on outside influences and past experiences. If you leave a infant in solitary confinement with only nutrients to survive (sadly an extreme case of this situation has occurred), then that child will become a vegetable, or at best be reduced to the status of an animal. And a vegetable more or less has no will, not even a will of which to live. So human beings are actually "built up" from there experiences and the way that they are built up from the "nurture" aspect is the "nature" aspect. You may say that people lack fundamental axioms, but in fact the experiences of a human being develops or destroys these axioms on a regular basis.
The reason I brought up free will is because many religions hinge on this concept. They say that the choices you make decide your fate in the afterlife, however, wouldn't it be a sham if you did not actually have control over this situation? That's where the "free" in free will actually comes from. If you were destines to sin and go to hell since your birth, would you not have been created with the full knowledge that you would only suffer? That's where determinism comes into play. If you say there is an algorithm that implements "free" will, could that algorithm not be used to influence your every action? If your actions are predetermines and you can never escape them, then you may have a will, however that will is not "free". All your actions are solely based on outside stimulus (or lack thereof).
You can't prove that the very existence that your consciousness experiences is real, so how can you even start with god? And even if you prove that god is real, I'm pretty sure that any specific religion, that has been warped and twisted to meet someone's needs/wants, would suddenly be right. How much farther would you have to go to make sure he does/doesn't addresses himself as Allah, and wants you to beat women if they read? And going even further, how can you prove that there is such a thing as free will? Randomness doesn't cut it, because randomness is described as something that has no defined mechanism for its outcome, so there's is no telling whether a "random event" is just a mechanism that we are unable to measure properly (and thus unable to predict), but is still a well-defined mechanism that could even occur in a separate dimension/universe. Thus we are unable to prove even randomness (not to mention that randomness doesn't even mean you have a "free" will, it just means you have an unpredictable will). I'm sorry to burst so many bubbles, but we really can't even begin to answer these profound questions without the fundamentals, so please stop getting ahead of yourselves.
What's more funny is that most of these are aerobic exercises. Just play soccer or something. I hope these fail, because this only makes the art of "fun exercise" less social.
It sucks that there seem to be so many people that don't understand how impossible it is to prevent pirating with conventional technology (and it's always them that are in charge). The reason you can't win is because there will always be a way to circumvent the methods implemented, unless you want to utterly eliminate freedom on the internet or the freedom to purchase what technology you want. It's like the war between virus and anti virus, except the "enemy" has a MUCH greater incentive with MUCH more people supporting them. Making drugs illegal has only make an incentive to distribute them more, and pirating has become a market due to its illegality as well. Fighting harder will just make more of an incentive to start a pirating company that fights back more for profit. And fighting harder in this manner usually uses tax money, not money directly from the company.
Actually, when I played Morrowind I completely beet the game with alchemy and enchanting. The enchanting skill was so useful because if you killed a skeleton and put it into a cheap soul gem, you could make 10 damage fireballs rain like crazy, and the potions essentially kept you immortal. By the time I had high level enchanting, I could kill just about anything. All you had to do was keep a massive supply of rings on you. It was way too easy.
Even though I'm a big fan of the Elder Scrolls series, the voice actors weren't the only bone I had to pick. The team had a large dynamic engine that they could have taken more advantage of and didn't. Although the fighting was improved, it didn't feel very interactive (nor expansive). The way that could be improved is to integrate the classes a bit more. They gave you the feature to fight as a mage/fighter/rouge, but the system didn't demand nor support integration very much. Alchemy was the only skill that was really useful throughout all the classes, but a warrior never really had a great need to cast a fireball when his fighting was so much more effective. A wizard never really needed to sneak when invisibility was much more convenient. They should have made monsters that are more immune to certain tactics. For instance, a mage comes upon a vampire that has extraordinary hearing. Rather than casting a spell, you'll have to depend on your sneaking abilities to approach him. You cast a freezing spell that is useless on him and must throw a (potions should have been throwable) exploding potion to knock him back since fire is also useless, then you pull out your sword with copious amounts of poison on it to subdue him (your skill with a sword does not matter since the poison is so effective). Also, the physics engine could have more juice squeezed out of it. There should have been gravity gun telekinesis and the ability to pick things up and throw them. Imagine being ambushed by some nut in a bar and throwing a chair at him to knock him back for a stronger attack. Man that would have improved the game a lot.
*whooooosh* (btw dominator, that was a monty python reference you responded to)
$29 million doesn't buy much these days.
Define "much." Because this country has many people that truly can't buy "much" "these days". As soon as there's an eminent war with a global super power (because anything shorter of one wouldn't merit this program), I'm pretty sure a lot of us are going to look back and say "I wish all that money was spent on stabilizing our economy and international relations rather than on big guns for the pricks that started this conflict."
This is exactly why it's so useless to prevent pirating of digital media. As long as the purchased information is streamed into an output device, it can be pirated. You don't even need software for it, as there can be hardware as such as monitors and speakers that can be rigged to record their output.
Mod the parent up. The summary can cause some confusion for the many people who don't RTFA
The United states could seriously use these for public transportation. Every time I go into a crowded parking lot I think, "right here lies enough resources to get one of those done." Can you imagine how convenient it would be to have smaller versions branch off and routed to homes for delivery and single person travel? You wouldn't even have to leave home for groceries, and daily travel would be shortened exponentially.
But the real question is, when do I get my set of super long prehensile boners?
This is a very debatable subject and it varies with the game mechanics and the foresight of the designers. There are many games that get ruined by scamming and ksing, but there are many games that have very altruistic guilds set up. I remember in diablo 2, after I became well equipped on 2 characters, I set out to start a clan that helped out noobs. Eventually, we had a large group of people that had a lot of fun together. We would have the decently equiped lite sorcs do normal and nightmare rushes for many people, and the hammerdins would do hell and get hellforge. The runes would help the noobs a bit, and some of the rushed accounts were made into common accounts that any guild member could use. We only got a few well equipped, and only high ranking members could use those. But it was fun for the noobs to instantly try out a new build with decent equipment without having to build one up alone. Only a few accounts got stolen (there will always be a greedy person), but not so much was lost that we utterly lost trust. We even had inter-clan duels with mid level naked characters for fun. We did a bunch of clan tournaments and events that greatly enhanced the experience of the game to a point that no one could really do alone. Has anyone who played d2 ever done cow level and other quests with 8 summon necros? I only lagged out once and another member lagged out twice, but it was still VERY fun. Another fun event was naked cowing with 8 fire druids. The d-torches made for SOOOO much fire it was hilarious (we had mercs with infinity).
I know that a lot of people aren't taking this issue to heart, and a lot of people agree that relative to the university budget, this isn't a lot of money to be spent. However, people need to stop seeing this as a fraction of a large budget, and start seeing it for what it truly is. It isn't until the economy start to depreciate that people see the value of small numbers, and if they would have seen it earlier, it would be helping them out more in desperate times. Just last year, my university paid for Carlos Mencia to do some stand up. Apart from the fact that he's a terrible comedian that did the exact act that anyone can see on comedy central, I'm sure they spent somewhere in the area of the amount that it would cost to keep our multimillion dollar gymnasium a bit cooler for the rest of the year. When you waste that kind of money on something useless, you're not doing your job of keeping university priorities strait. What my university essentially said, is that it's important for some hack to tell everyone that Mexicans eat burritos, so we have to sacrifice comfort when working out. Hell, the robotics club could have used a fraction of that for a better processor on our land vehicle.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that this is actually a good thing? What blizzard is saying is that their massive team of elite game developers simply do not have the time to fit the enormous amount of content they want to put in. This means that there will most likely be 2 more WELL-WORTH games that follow the series coming out. I know how much I wanted to go to blizzard and say "can you make another?" when it came to the brood war expansion. If there were only campaigns that came with the expansions, then people would just pirate it and buy the cd-keys for cheep online. Chances are, the expansions will have more units/buildings, more areas, more neutral objects, and possibly new functions to the old units/buildings. And chances are each one will redefine the way the game is played, and lead to many more hours of good gaming, which is much more than you can say about a whole lot of other expansions.
I don't like replying to my own comment, but I felt that I should have been a bit more proficient (not just in my bad grammar and typos) in explaining that mathematics also has to evolve to take advantage of the quantum principles. As you can imagine, the field of "uncalculating" isn't very big, just as Boolean algebra wasn't so big before transistors. That is another factor in making quantum computers that will be incorporated into every-day use.
Actually, it doesn't matter how fast a classical computer operates, a quantum computer WILL go exponentially faster regardless. I researched quantum computers in a laureate report I did a few year back. Quantum computers are able to achieve a dual state as a result of calculations. Also, quantum computers operate on the mathematical principles of a unitary matrix. One of the properties of a unitary matrix is it's reversibility, so that any operation that can be perform can be "unperformed". So take the ability to reverse calculations and achieve more than one answer at once, and you can "unperform" at an exponential rate. For example, you have a matrix with an "and" gate. If you where to reverse the and gate on the value '0', superposition will allow you to get the answers '10', '01', and '00' all at the same time. This means that a 64-qubit computer and theoretically "unrun" 2^64 (more than the molecules in the universe) times faster than a 64-bit computer. Now that is just a simplified gist of things. I don't want any physicists saying "you forgot the Hademard gate etc." The process is much more elaborate, and much more prone to other factors.
Now as for you other comments: 1) quantum computers will be a better candidate for simulating AI on a common commercial scale, and 2) quantum computing already is possible. The discovery that will most likely be made is the ability to create a room-temperature equivalent of a Bose-Einstein condensate so that topological quantum computers (the most reliable model so far) can be fit onto something the size of a thumb.
Your statement is ironically close to the truth. Quantum computers actually function in parallel to conventional devices when it comes to the simple tasks that they perform, such as rendering intricate scenes, or estimating series values. What quantum computers are better at is taking advantage of quantum effects to exponentially outperform conventional computers at things such as factoring immense integers. They will most likely be used for decryption and quantum simulations, or other mathematically novel applications. In other words, it benefits businesses and scientists the most. They will most likely have commercial value in the future, but that is when they develop more uses for it, such as emulating the human mind to make ultra-realistic (if not realistic) AI. At the moment however, it is still in the computer equivalent stage of useless behemoth. Someone in some field will most likely make a huge discovery similar to the silicon transistors of the past, win a Nobel prize, and set the stage for a new revolution. Feels like a long way from now, but I'll probably be proved wrong.
China could just host a lot of the Olympic events in-doors. Then they can develop a better energy policy. Better use of everyone's resources. Besides, it's not like they have a democratic utopia. Just ration off energy and reduce pollution better that way.
but one felon was black and the other white
Well according to statistics it was clearly the black one
(note to mods, this is a joke)