A lot of these ideas didn't seem to have really died, so much as to have never taken off. Many remain stuck in the same niche market of their inception. One that is a strong counterexample to to this is the slide rule. It certainly achieved great popularity in its time, but is now almost unrecognizable to most people nowadays. However, in introductory physics lab, at Brandeis, constructing one and performing calculations with it was part of our final exam. It was a very valuable experience. I don't think students in school ever really learn about logarithms like they did back before HP started popping out calculators.
I'd be interested in working to develop it. I think that it is possible to have a moderation scheme like/. or maybe reader voting like www.kuro5hin.org. There could be a trust metric like that used by advogato or sourceforge as well to allow for evaluation of the evaluators. This would turn it into a peer review type process. If anyone is interested, please email me: HomeySmurf at hotmail dot com.
I was under the impression, that what really fueled and financed the Renaissance was the Plague. It wiped out such a huge number of people, that it rapidly eliminated overcrowding in the cities and allowed for unparalleled social mobility at the time due to the massive underemployment. It allowed the growth of the skilled middle class and craft guilds. This is related to technology, but the main reason for the Renaissance prosperity was that people were allowed to achieve positions of prominence and importance due to their abilities and not their parentage. When the population has been so gravely reduced, positions of responsibility and power fall on those who rise to the occassion. This results in the technological growth. It is the reason the United States rose to such great prosperity (we were a frontier country in which people rose to power by their own work and ingenuity, and why were are helped by the influx of plucky immigrants). Such a phenomenon is certainly seem in the Roman Empire. When an Emperor left the throne to his son the Empire decayed (e.g. Caligula, Commodus, et al.), and when it was given to a nominated successor, the Empire prospered (Trajan, Hadrian, et al.).
How well does this thing really work? Voice recognition alone is a huge project in which there are only very narrow inroads of open source work (indeed this was brought up here a while ago). I went to the webpages were they were selling some of the hardware to interface with appliances, and it seemed like a like a lot of hype.
Do you know of anyone who has this working, at least partially? As one poster said, this would definately make a good part of the/. front page! This is the kind of do it yourself geekiness that it is all about. Rather than features about people who paid a lot to have a bunch of fancy crap they never use, features of people who have added cool mods to their own houses. Sort of like a high tech version of this old house.:)
but it still annoys me that none of the really cool, top of the line toys come up with any support for Linux/Unix while still supporting Mac OS at the same time info here. The first place I ever saw a digital camera was in a physics lab, and I know that some of the consumers of this technology are going to be high end computer users, maybe even webmasters who own Suns. Now what is the point of not supporting any Unices. The other thing is that these undeniable geek toys appeal to technophile types in high paying tech jobs...prime Unix users.
The Earth's magnetic field is a relatively weak dipole, so at the equator it decays roughly as 1/r^3 vs the gravitional force field which goes like 1/r^2. However, it is still present. The sun also produces measurable magnetic fields to a great distance (these can be very unstable, but they exist). So even though the magnetic field decays faster than the gravitional field, it is not so much faster.
Anyway my point is that it is not unreasonable to imagine something that can travel around using these fields. Momentum can be transfered via photon exchange (ie through the fields) and thus the object could accelerate. This doesn't seem like it would be very efficient in terms of power consumption, but using super conductors, there is no loss to heating, so the only loss would be to the photons that accelerate the object around.
This means that an object with such a propulsion system might be able to move itself around the solar system without any reaction mass. That means that it could accelerate around indefinately as long as it was receiving solar power. Lots of probes are limited by the amount of reaction mass that they carry. It forces NASA to use very arcane calculations to make the most efficient trips around the solar system (look at the trajectories of the Voyager sattelites for example). The whole point of a mass driver is that it could use the reaction mass efficiently. But this drive idea would obviate the need for this.
For example, whenever you speed up or slow down on the earth, momentum is being transfered. The earth is the thing picking up and losing momentum. It is just that you never notice it because it is so massive.
I am sure a lot of/.'ers know about Moller International, but Moller actually built a functioning flying saucer like machine back in the late 60's/early 70's that flew to a height of 20 feet or something. Now his designs are very different, but he is currently trying to get together enough money to start production of a flying car...a la George Jetson.
It is not that the Internet doesn't get respect, it gets too much respect for its current state. The fact is that companies are worried that people will be able to basically watch television on their computers and thus bypass traditional television. However, the problem is that the internet can't handle that right now. There isn't enough bandwidth for home users to all watch anything as high quality as television all the time. The fact that most home users still use dial-up (and home users are going to be the big entertainment consumers) keeps websites with lots of flash (literally Flash, but heavy multi-media) from being commercially viable. The web is in a transition state. Everyone realizes the potential power of streaming multimedia, but at the same time no one has been able to make a profitable go at it.
One last thing is that there will always be ways to market goods. So what is people transmit on their webpages images of a sporting event. Someone had to put up a video camera in the first place, and they should get money from all the companies whose signs line the stadium. I am told that Australian football games are shown superimposed on giant logos on the field. This will happen sooner or later, much like the New Years broadcasts. Hell, maybe even the pattern on the tie of the nightly news anchor will turn into little Coca-Cola logos.
Anyway, all I am saying is that the web is in a transitional period as people actually give it too much respect and fear as they try to figure out what it is possible of doing. And what they don't realize is that television, radio, etc is all becoming part of the internet (literally true if you have digital cable, broadband phone service, and a cable modem). As you say, all the major networks show video clips.
At some level this is nothing new. All professional sporting events in the US are all prefaced by a little statement that any recording or broadcasting of the event without the express written consent of whatever association runs the sport (NFL, NHL, NBA, etc.) is a crime.
However, at what level does this become news and thus open to the public? Surely it seems inappropriate to forbid posting scores or even showing still images of the athletes. Then at what level does this blur into showing a series of still images?
Is it possible for criminals to own the legal rights to the recordings of them committing criminal acts? (I reserve judgement on whether a home video of a bunch of MPAA lawyers at work counts as a crime).
Somehow it is legal to Wal-Mart to film me while I am in the parking lot, and presumably do whatever they want with the film, and yet I can't bring my camcorder into the Olympic games for which I paid a fortue for a ticket and then put it on my website. It is not really that surprising, but at the same time it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Anyway, just another example of the collision of ancient systems of exchange entertaiment as information intersecting with the modern world.
The reason that I am really looking forward to this mini-series is that it opens the possibility of the other books being put onto film as well. I think the sci-fi channel probably will be able to do that if the response is good; however the Dune universe is an immensely complicated one (just look at the now out of print Dune Enyclopedia).
One thing that is unfortunate is that H.R. Giger did a bunch of preliminary design work for the Lynch movie that was never used. It doesn't seem to have been used for this film either. Partly because I think that Giger is probably fantastically expensive, but it is still unfortunate. He did a lot of work on the Harkonnen (of course). Examples of his work (and a little blurb about work on Ridley Scott's Dune) in the movies section of Giger Page . You can even see the "Harkonnen Chair", and buy one I think. They are the chairs in Giger bars.
Indeed, almost all her studies have been refuted (I am going to try to dredge up what little I can remember about all of this). She was part of the school of thought called cultural relativitists which still exists today. It really came from Franz Boaz her teacher and an anthropologist in the early part of this century.
Cultural relativists believed that people were mostly a product of their culture, and sought to prove that things like gender roles were purely cultural in construction. They had a bit of the noble savage type mentality going on as well. Part of their ideas (more implicit than overtly stated) was that a lot of other, more 'primitive' cultures were a lot off in many ways because they were free from the rigid strictures of western society.
In addition to her seminal work, Coming of Age in Samoa, in which she 'proved' that puberty was an easy process without all the stresses that appear among teenagers in our society. This has since been shown to basically have been a lot of crap. She was mostly trying to provide anecdotal evidence to provide the theoretical foundation of her socio-political agenda.
She went on to study a few other cultures. One was called the Tchambuli people, and that had something of a matriarchal system, and she used these seemingly reversed gender roles to show that they are the result of enculturation. Again, this whole study has now been refuted.
She should well be remembered as a pioneer in the field of ethnography (writing about another culture), but her scientific detachment left a lot to be lacking. She went out trying to prove her beliefs, and like many before her succeeded. It turned out to be helpful that her proof existed on the far Pacific Rim and spoke funny languages.
Unfortunately I don't have any references at hand, but this is discussed a some length (with good references) in the book Human Universals. As an aside, there is also a book which I believe is called, the Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl or something similar (which I have not read) that tells of a male baby who was raised as a girl due to a botched circumsision because his physician was a cultural relativitist. Of course, the child had all sorts of problems going up, and opted to live as a man later in life. Anyway, just an anecdote of how the cultural relativists have made at least one persons life miserable. As a counterpoint there is an interesting book Gender Outlaw that is partly an autobiography of a man who had a sex change operation to become a lesbian, and it is filled with interesting ideas on the complexity of gender (as you might imagine).
Although this has regressed into a discussion of gender, I only wanted to make the point that Margaret Mead had a strong agenda in her 'research' and writing that does not make her an objective observer. It is easy to say that the world is becoming too complex and fast paced. But maybe they said that with the domestication of the horse (and I won't go into listing all the technological advances improving transportation and communication since then).
This fellow Mossberg is confusing infrastructure problems with the real tech-edge. The US leads the world research and development in technology by such a wide margin it is ridiculous. MIT alone is probably responsible for more innovation than almost any other foreign country. (This is not a troll, I honestly believe it, for example consider that Bell Labs of the 20th century probably achieved more in computer science than any foreign nation. One reason the US can do this is that we suck up all the foreign talent, but the point is that we have the international best and brightest here.)
Certainly, other countries will be able to leapfrog over American infrastructures to get the newest technologies set up, but the US still has amazing technological inertia. The whole world led the US in cellular communication (including places like Brazil). However, that doesn't mean that the US is not going to replace this with a better technology in the near future.
Although wireless technology is big, it is only a tiny piece of the technological pie. Indeed in some ways it is an "old technology".
Also do I need to say it here on Slashdot what mandated standardization does? What if M$ was the mandated operating system (which if the US gov was to have mandated an OS, it certainly would have chosen M$, indeed one reason for the rise of the PC and M$ was its choice as a government standard in the US). The reason people much smarter than we are (ie Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin) made the United States this way, is because it is the best system there is.
It seems weird that they mention that the plasmas reflect radio waves, so that they can be used to render sats and space vessels invisible to radar. The whole point of radar is that when it bounces off, the reflection is what is detected. Now later he says that it is possible to make it absorb radar, but I am not sure how that is possible. I am not up on my plasma physics, but I don't see how this can be the case. Would it have to be precisely tuned in some way I can't picture, in which case the radar transmitter needs only to change frequency rapidly.
The other thing is that supposing you build this fancy structure around space ships, then just forget about using microwave energy blasts. Tunable X-ray lasers are a possibility using free electron laser technology; visible light passes through these plasmas without any scattering it seems, so probably even visible spectrum lasers have no problem. Hell, what is wrong with regular matter based weapons like mass drivers and rockets. That might be a good use for the radar shielding technology. Missle defense programs depend on being able to detect the incoming object. However, how well can you keep the plasma shield around a rapidly accelerating object? I guess you could fire something from a mass driver, because then it would be moving a constant velocity once it left the gun.
I am not sure the commercial aspect is really the important feature of the transportation. One of the main aspects of submarines is that they are able to essentially disappear. It is extremely difficult to detect US submarines when they go quiet. Obviously the supercavitation drive would make a lot of noise coming and going, but that still gives you only a very general picture of where the sub is.
I have a problem with these "mass difference" boundaries on different types of neutrinos. The problem with neutrinos is that they are neutral and very light. That means they don't really interact with matter. They are detected by huge tanks of water. When the occassional neutrino interacts with a water molecule, they use calorimetry to measure its energy and thus deduce its mass. Now if this sounds like a very imprecise measurement method, it is. That is the problem.
The other thing is that they three traditional neutrinos are linked to the three leptons (electron, muon, and tau). A forth neutrino would probably not be part of this triumvirate, and why a tau neutrino was predicted but not measured before. The idea is that is required for the conservation of energy in weak interactions with tau particles. For example, the original (now electron) neutrino was posited to exist for conservation of energy in the decay of a neutron into a proton and electron (the extra energy went into the neutrino).
Actually the standard model links the 3 leptons to the 3 quark family only because that is what is involved in the energy reactions we have observed. When you hear about these 3 pairs, there is nothing restricting there from being an infinite number of heavier "fundamental" particles, but they would be so much heavier than the top quark, that we will never have funding to try to detect them.
One last thing is that there is some stuff about the Higgs scalar boson in this month's Scientific American. This is the scalar field responsible for mass and gravity. It is probably worth reading if you are into this stuff. It is one of the things that CERN is trying to detect. It is interesting that the US based Fermilab is trying to concentrate on tau neutrinos which are available at a much lower energy, and thus we are trying to make up for the lack of a cutting edge accelerator, while CERN forges ahead to make up for there loss in the top quark race.
As a graduate student in physics I would point out that the European female students are much better looking than the American ones (especially the Italians). I guess the female physicists can say the same thing though. As one female colleague observed, from her perspective "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."
I think there is something about the culture of American science that encourages you to ignore your personal appearance, perhaps inspired by Einstein and countless sloppy engineers. However in Europe they acknowledge that you can still be a good scientist while caring about your appearance and doing things like eating well, getting semi-periodic haircuts, regular bathing, etc.
Maybe this is because European physicists were traditionally more dapper. The Europeans tend to come from a tradition of academic scholars from the upper classes, while a lot of the American scientists are from the (lower) middle classes (and the early 20th century European immigrant physicists were poor Jewish exiles). Compare pictures of people like Richard Feynman and John Von Neumann; Feynman looks like a street vagrant by comparison. The Europeans sometimes even make their physicists nobles (like Lord Calvin and Newton) if they aren't already (DeBroglie). We just give them tenure and maybe a book deal.
It is interesting that you mention PCS as opposed to analog. I don't know what all the commotion about the quality of analog phones is? I live in NH, which is not great on coverage, but I never really noticed a problem. Most of the situations that you use a cell phone in, ie driving, restaurants, outdoors in general, have enough sound pollution that it doesn't matter. I only have a PCS phone now because the service plans are much cheaper and there are more features.
Another thing is that analog phones degrade in quality as the signal goes down. Digital phones will just start cutting out. In some sense, I prefer the degraded signal, you can still communicate and you know that your signal is getting worse rather than having to watch the little signal bars as you travel (and how the heck are you supposed to do that when the thing is up against your ear).
At work I currently use the application Exceed. It is an excellent client package with a huge number of options. It has the cool feature of allowing you to emulate the X environment of whatever machine you are connecting to or to just have X-style windows pop up in your normal windows environment. I have not really messed with it very much, as now that I've gotten it working I just run it and pretend that I have my own Sun workstation, but I assure you it is an amazing program with tons of tweakable features. It is produced by Hummingbird Communications. Exceed Product Link
It seems that all sorts of console games are sold as single CD's. There is no reason that PC games can't be sold in such a way. The only difference is that historically PC games included lots of documentation and goodies, just as console games did. However, the marketing wizards figured out that people don't read instructions for console games, and they never have problems with sound/video cards.
When are PC game companies going to realize that their consumers are no more inclined to read documentation, and that it is much cheaper for them to just sell the CD's. No one reads the documentation unless they have a problem, and it could just as easily be on the CD as an html document. Such is the case with the great game Settlers. The box is just a waste of material. Since the PC market is mostly Windows based, there need be no fear of the user lacking a web-browser (just Try to delete Explorer).
but if Microsoft splits up a lot of businesses will be spending even more money on software that works less well and that doesn't interface that great.
This is the whole point! A monopolistic company inherently produces inferior products at greater costs to the consumer. A breakup of the monopoly can only serve the needs of the consumer. Companies will have to offer better products for cheaper prices to survive. Much fewer M$ millionaires, but better products.
Lets face it, the software industry is still a young one, but it is changing as huge numbers of people retrain themselves in needed skills, that is one reason there is such underemployment in low-wage jobs. As software companies have to become more competitive, jobs will be much less cushy, but better products will be produced for less cost to the consumer.
Consider phone service, does anyone else remember when the phone company owned all the phones, and they sucked. Now phones can do all kinds of amazing things and they are very cheap by comparison. Long distance and international rates are much lower and now there so many new services (caller ID, voice mail, *69, etc). In 5 years we will be amazed at how awesome, cheap, integrated and efficient all the Office Spin offs are, especially the ones that run on Linux.
Now, I assume that ingesting the neurotransmitters would cause them to break down. However, with all the current power juices out there supposedly providing intellectual stimulation, wouldn't it be possible to synthesize this NMDA neurotransmitter and give it to people in injections. Who cares about the mice, as long as it is known to work in humans to increase memory and facilitate learning, then lets get some!
My idea: since the gene has already been isolated, just put this gene into some common bacterial DNA. The bacteria will produce lots of the stuff, just isolate it somehow (centrifuge, etc), purify and then bottle the stuff. Maybe it will need to be refrigerated and have a short shelf life like insulin, but whatever. It'll still be valuable even if it has to be frozen in liquid nitrogen.
Now who wouldn't pay for a super drug that actually increases brain power? Use it before cramming for finals, before taking a standardized test, before a technical interview, etc.
Now the FDA takes forever to approve drugs, and rightly so. However, this is a natural part of the human body, and maybe not so dangerous. Also, put the manufacturing plant in Mexico or Brazil where you can buy all kinds of things like viagra and penicillin over the counter.
So who's going to go look for venture capital with me. The IPO is in a month and a half!
I have had nothing but problems with my Roadrunner. It would be very hard for me to go back to a (now) exceedingly slow modem, but there are still many problems that I have had. I lose connection all the time for brief intervals (30 - 60 seconds approximately) all the time, and I have had numerous problems with billing. There phone based customer service sucks, and all in all I am very annoyed with Mediaone. Unfortunately, they have the cable monopoly in my area. That is what is annoying to me. There are town laws only allowing the one cable provider. This kind of thing is foolish. They enjoy a government regulated monopoly, which allows them to have a crappy product and worse customer service. Does anyone else share these problems? The fact that AT&T is going to have to reduce the Mediaone empire makes me nothing but happy.
Why is there not mention of a sattelite link? What happened to those Iridium sattelites? If they cool link up with whatever company was buying the Iridium Sattelites, or at perhaps lauch some of their own (ie via one of the commercial companies that launches rockets) they could sell proprietary hardware to link with the sattelites...jamming is a possibility, but only locally. There are international regs controlling this. As long as they obey international law with regards to signal transmission, they should be alright
The law does lump people who break the law into the overarching category of "lawbreakers"; however, it certainly divides that up into felonies and misdemeanors, and further divides up the felonies into different classes. There is also tort law and the whole idea of liabilities. I think that civil justice can be much more painful to spammers than whatever criminal penalties would be assessed (they would be very light since the crime not inherently harmful). If automatic class action suits could be filed so that every person who receives a piece of spam from a spammer is owed $.05, I think the world would be a much better place. Not to mention that anyone with accounts on AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo mail would have an wonderful new revenue stream.
I don't think there is anything wrong with having bounties for people who catch criminals, at any level of crime. It has been shown time and time again that what prevents crime is strict enforcement rather than harsh penalties. No criminal does his crime if he thinks he is going to be caught. If we have a problem with it being a crime we should decrimininalize it rather than being hypocritical and not seriously enforcing it.
Encouraging every citizen to be on the look out for crimes in progress merely amplifies everyone's civil duty and reduces the price of hiring more law officers. The only problems to be avoided are people potentially being "framed" and so forth, but that is already a problem today. That is what insurance fraud investigation is about.
How long will it be before they can actually make a waterproof, shock resistant laptop? Something like that Sony did to do the Walkman with their Sony Sport series.
Does anyone know anything about an effort to make really sturdy laptops? I would imagine there would be a huge market for things like this. I know there are laptops with features like an easily replaceable shield for the monitor. Ones with sealed keyboards to resist Coke and pizza stains, but what about a real honest to god Vaio Sport or something (maybe not in bright yellow, but why not?)
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A lot of these ideas didn't seem to have really died, so much as to have never taken off. Many remain stuck in the same niche market of their inception. One that is a strong counterexample to to this is the slide rule. It certainly achieved great popularity in its time, but is now almost unrecognizable to most people nowadays. However, in introductory physics lab, at Brandeis, constructing one and performing calculations with it was part of our final exam. It was a very valuable experience. I don't think students in school ever really learn about logarithms like they did back before HP started popping out calculators.
I'd be interested in working to develop it. I think that it is possible to have a moderation scheme like /. or maybe reader voting like www.kuro5hin.org. There could be a trust metric like that used by advogato or sourceforge as well to allow for evaluation of the evaluators. This would turn it into a peer review type process. If anyone is interested, please email me: HomeySmurf at hotmail dot com.
I was under the impression, that what really fueled and financed the Renaissance was the Plague. It wiped out such a huge number of people, that it rapidly eliminated overcrowding in the cities and allowed for unparalleled social mobility at the time due to the massive underemployment. It allowed the growth of the skilled middle class and craft guilds. This is related to technology, but the main reason for the Renaissance prosperity was that people were allowed to achieve positions of prominence and importance due to their abilities and not their parentage. When the population has been so gravely reduced, positions of responsibility and power fall on those who rise to the occassion. This results in the technological growth. It is the reason the United States rose to such great prosperity (we were a frontier country in which people rose to power by their own work and ingenuity, and why were are helped by the influx of plucky immigrants). Such a phenomenon is certainly seem in the Roman Empire. When an Emperor left the throne to his son the Empire decayed (e.g. Caligula, Commodus, et al.), and when it was given to a nominated successor, the Empire prospered (Trajan, Hadrian, et al.).
How well does this thing really work? Voice recognition alone is a huge project in which there are only very narrow inroads of open source work (indeed this was brought up here a while ago). I went to the webpages were they were selling some of the hardware to interface with appliances, and it seemed like a like a lot of hype.
Do you know of anyone who has this working, at least partially? As one poster said, this would definately make a good part of the /. front page! This is the kind of do it yourself geekiness that it is all about. Rather than features about people who paid a lot to have a bunch of fancy crap they never use, features of people who have added cool mods to their own houses. Sort of like a high tech version of this old house. :)
but it still annoys me that none of the really cool, top of the line toys come up with any support for Linux/Unix while still supporting Mac OS at the same time info here. The first place I ever saw a digital camera was in a physics lab, and I know that some of the consumers of this technology are going to be high end computer users, maybe even webmasters who own Suns. Now what is the point of not supporting any Unices. The other thing is that these undeniable geek toys appeal to technophile types in high paying tech jobs...prime Unix users.
The Earth's magnetic field is a relatively weak dipole, so at the equator it decays roughly as 1/r^3 vs the gravitional force field which goes like 1/r^2. However, it is still present. The sun also produces measurable magnetic fields to a great distance (these can be very unstable, but they exist). So even though the magnetic field decays faster than the gravitional field, it is not so much faster.
Anyway my point is that it is not unreasonable to imagine something that can travel around using these fields. Momentum can be transfered via photon exchange (ie through the fields) and thus the object could accelerate. This doesn't seem like it would be very efficient in terms of power consumption, but using super conductors, there is no loss to heating, so the only loss would be to the photons that accelerate the object around.
This means that an object with such a propulsion system might be able to move itself around the solar system without any reaction mass. That means that it could accelerate around indefinately as long as it was receiving solar power. Lots of probes are limited by the amount of reaction mass that they carry. It forces NASA to use very arcane calculations to make the most efficient trips around the solar system (look at the trajectories of the Voyager sattelites for example). The whole point of a mass driver is that it could use the reaction mass efficiently. But this drive idea would obviate the need for this.
For example, whenever you speed up or slow down on the earth, momentum is being transfered. The earth is the thing picking up and losing momentum. It is just that you never notice it because it is so massive.
I am sure a lot of /.'ers know about Moller International, but Moller actually built a functioning flying saucer like machine back in the late 60's/early 70's that flew to a height of 20 feet or something. Now his designs are very different, but he is currently trying to get together enough money to start production of a flying car...a la George Jetson.
It is not that the Internet doesn't get respect, it gets too much respect for its current state. The fact is that companies are worried that people will be able to basically watch television on their computers and thus bypass traditional television. However, the problem is that the internet can't handle that right now. There isn't enough bandwidth for home users to all watch anything as high quality as television all the time. The fact that most home users still use dial-up (and home users are going to be the big entertainment consumers) keeps websites with lots of flash (literally Flash, but heavy multi-media) from being commercially viable. The web is in a transition state. Everyone realizes the potential power of streaming multimedia, but at the same time no one has been able to make a profitable go at it.
One last thing is that there will always be ways to market goods. So what is people transmit on their webpages images of a sporting event. Someone had to put up a video camera in the first place, and they should get money from all the companies whose signs line the stadium. I am told that Australian football games are shown superimposed on giant logos on the field. This will happen sooner or later, much like the New Years broadcasts. Hell, maybe even the pattern on the tie of the nightly news anchor will turn into little Coca-Cola logos.
Anyway, all I am saying is that the web is in a transitional period as people actually give it too much respect and fear as they try to figure out what it is possible of doing. And what they don't realize is that television, radio, etc is all becoming part of the internet (literally true if you have digital cable, broadband phone service, and a cable modem). As you say, all the major networks show video clips.
At some level this is nothing new. All professional sporting events in the US are all prefaced by a little statement that any recording or broadcasting of the event without the express written consent of whatever association runs the sport (NFL, NHL, NBA, etc.) is a crime.
However, at what level does this become news and thus open to the public? Surely it seems inappropriate to forbid posting scores or even showing still images of the athletes. Then at what level does this blur into showing a series of still images?
Is it possible for criminals to own the legal rights to the recordings of them committing criminal acts? (I reserve judgement on whether a home video of a bunch of MPAA lawyers at work counts as a crime).
Somehow it is legal to Wal-Mart to film me while I am in the parking lot, and presumably do whatever they want with the film, and yet I can't bring my camcorder into the Olympic games for which I paid a fortue for a ticket and then put it on my website. It is not really that surprising, but at the same time it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Anyway, just another example of the collision of ancient systems of exchange entertaiment as information intersecting with the modern world.
The reason that I am really looking forward to this mini-series is that it opens the possibility of the other books being put onto film as well. I think the sci-fi channel probably will be able to do that if the response is good; however the Dune universe is an immensely complicated one (just look at the now out of print Dune Enyclopedia).
One thing that is unfortunate is that H.R. Giger did a bunch of preliminary design work for the Lynch movie that was never used. It doesn't seem to have been used for this film either. Partly because I think that Giger is probably fantastically expensive, but it is still unfortunate. He did a lot of work on the Harkonnen (of course). Examples of his work (and a little blurb about work on Ridley Scott's Dune) in the movies section of Giger Page . You can even see the "Harkonnen Chair", and buy one I think. They are the chairs in Giger bars.
Indeed, almost all her studies have been refuted (I am going to try to dredge up what little I can remember about all of this). She was part of the school of thought called cultural relativitists which still exists today. It really came from Franz Boaz her teacher and an anthropologist in the early part of this century.
Cultural relativists believed that people were mostly a product of their culture, and sought to prove that things like gender roles were purely cultural in construction. They had a bit of the noble savage type mentality going on as well. Part of their ideas (more implicit than overtly stated) was that a lot of other, more 'primitive' cultures were a lot off in many ways because they were free from the rigid strictures of western society.
In addition to her seminal work, Coming of Age in Samoa, in which she 'proved' that puberty was an easy process without all the stresses that appear among teenagers in our society. This has since been shown to basically have been a lot of crap. She was mostly trying to provide anecdotal evidence to provide the theoretical foundation of her socio-political agenda.
She went on to study a few other cultures. One was called the Tchambuli people, and that had something of a matriarchal system, and she used these seemingly reversed gender roles to show that they are the result of enculturation. Again, this whole study has now been refuted.
She should well be remembered as a pioneer in the field of ethnography (writing about another culture), but her scientific detachment left a lot to be lacking. She went out trying to prove her beliefs, and like many before her succeeded. It turned out to be helpful that her proof existed on the far Pacific Rim and spoke funny languages.
Unfortunately I don't have any references at hand, but this is discussed a some length (with good references) in the book Human Universals. As an aside, there is also a book which I believe is called, the Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl or something similar (which I have not read) that tells of a male baby who was raised as a girl due to a botched circumsision because his physician was a cultural relativitist. Of course, the child had all sorts of problems going up, and opted to live as a man later in life. Anyway, just an anecdote of how the cultural relativists have made at least one persons life miserable. As a counterpoint there is an interesting book Gender Outlaw that is partly an autobiography of a man who had a sex change operation to become a lesbian, and it is filled with interesting ideas on the complexity of gender (as you might imagine).
Although this has regressed into a discussion of gender, I only wanted to make the point that Margaret Mead had a strong agenda in her 'research' and writing that does not make her an objective observer. It is easy to say that the world is becoming too complex and fast paced. But maybe they said that with the domestication of the horse (and I won't go into listing all the technological advances improving transportation and communication since then).
This fellow Mossberg is confusing infrastructure problems with the real tech-edge. The US leads the world research and development in technology by such a wide margin it is ridiculous. MIT alone is probably responsible for more innovation than almost any other foreign country. (This is not a troll, I honestly believe it, for example consider that Bell Labs of the 20th century probably achieved more in computer science than any foreign nation. One reason the US can do this is that we suck up all the foreign talent, but the point is that we have the international best and brightest here.)
Certainly, other countries will be able to leapfrog over American infrastructures to get the newest technologies set up, but the US still has amazing technological inertia. The whole world led the US in cellular communication (including places like Brazil). However, that doesn't mean that the US is not going to replace this with a better technology in the near future.
Although wireless technology is big, it is only a tiny piece of the technological pie. Indeed in some ways it is an "old technology".
Also do I need to say it here on Slashdot what mandated standardization does? What if M$ was the mandated operating system (which if the US gov was to have mandated an OS, it certainly would have chosen M$, indeed one reason for the rise of the PC and M$ was its choice as a government standard in the US). The reason people much smarter than we are (ie Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin) made the United States this way, is because it is the best system there is.
It seems weird that they mention that the plasmas reflect radio waves, so that they can be used to render sats and space vessels invisible to radar. The whole point of radar is that when it bounces off, the reflection is what is detected. Now later he says that it is possible to make it absorb radar, but I am not sure how that is possible. I am not up on my plasma physics, but I don't see how this can be the case. Would it have to be precisely tuned in some way I can't picture, in which case the radar transmitter needs only to change frequency rapidly.
The other thing is that supposing you build this fancy structure around space ships, then just forget about using microwave energy blasts. Tunable X-ray lasers are a possibility using free electron laser technology; visible light passes through these plasmas without any scattering it seems, so probably even visible spectrum lasers have no problem. Hell, what is wrong with regular matter based weapons like mass drivers and rockets. That might be a good use for the radar shielding technology. Missle defense programs depend on being able to detect the incoming object. However, how well can you keep the plasma shield around a rapidly accelerating object? I guess you could fire something from a mass driver, because then it would be moving a constant velocity once it left the gun.
I am not sure the commercial aspect is really the important feature of the transportation. One of the main aspects of submarines is that they are able to essentially disappear. It is extremely difficult to detect US submarines when they go quiet. Obviously the supercavitation drive would make a lot of noise coming and going, but that still gives you only a very general picture of where the sub is.
I have a problem with these "mass difference" boundaries on different types of neutrinos. The problem with neutrinos is that they are neutral and very light. That means they don't really interact with matter. They are detected by huge tanks of water. When the occassional neutrino interacts with a water molecule, they use calorimetry to measure its energy and thus deduce its mass. Now if this sounds like a very imprecise measurement method, it is. That is the problem.
The other thing is that they three traditional neutrinos are linked to the three leptons (electron, muon, and tau). A forth neutrino would probably not be part of this triumvirate, and why a tau neutrino was predicted but not measured before. The idea is that is required for the conservation of energy in weak interactions with tau particles. For example, the original (now electron) neutrino was posited to exist for conservation of energy in the decay of a neutron into a proton and electron (the extra energy went into the neutrino).
Actually the standard model links the 3 leptons to the 3 quark family only because that is what is involved in the energy reactions we have observed. When you hear about these 3 pairs, there is nothing restricting there from being an infinite number of heavier "fundamental" particles, but they would be so much heavier than the top quark, that we will never have funding to try to detect them.
One last thing is that there is some stuff about the Higgs scalar boson in this month's Scientific American. This is the scalar field responsible for mass and gravity. It is probably worth reading if you are into this stuff. It is one of the things that CERN is trying to detect. It is interesting that the US based Fermilab is trying to concentrate on tau neutrinos which are available at a much lower energy, and thus we are trying to make up for the lack of a cutting edge accelerator, while CERN forges ahead to make up for there loss in the top quark race.
As a graduate student in physics I would point out that the European female students are much better looking than the American ones (especially the Italians). I guess the female physicists can say the same thing though. As one female colleague observed, from her perspective "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."
I think there is something about the culture of American science that encourages you to ignore your personal appearance, perhaps inspired by Einstein and countless sloppy engineers. However in Europe they acknowledge that you can still be a good scientist while caring about your appearance and doing things like eating well, getting semi-periodic haircuts, regular bathing, etc.
Maybe this is because European physicists were traditionally more dapper. The Europeans tend to come from a tradition of academic scholars from the upper classes, while a lot of the American scientists are from the (lower) middle classes (and the early 20th century European immigrant physicists were poor Jewish exiles). Compare pictures of people like Richard Feynman and John Von Neumann; Feynman looks like a street vagrant by comparison. The Europeans sometimes even make their physicists nobles (like Lord Calvin and Newton) if they aren't already (DeBroglie). We just give them tenure and maybe a book deal.
It is interesting that you mention PCS as opposed to analog. I don't know what all the commotion about the quality of analog phones is? I live in NH, which is not great on coverage, but I never really noticed a problem. Most of the situations that you use a cell phone in, ie driving, restaurants, outdoors in general, have enough sound pollution that it doesn't matter. I only have a PCS phone now because the service plans are much cheaper and there are more features.
Another thing is that analog phones degrade in quality as the signal goes down. Digital phones will just start cutting out. In some sense, I prefer the degraded signal, you can still communicate and you know that your signal is getting worse rather than having to watch the little signal bars as you travel (and how the heck are you supposed to do that when the thing is up against your ear).
At work I currently use the application Exceed. It is an excellent client package with a huge number of options. It has the cool feature of allowing you to emulate the X environment of whatever machine you are connecting to or to just have X-style windows pop up in your normal windows environment. I have not really messed with it very much, as now that I've gotten it working I just run it and pretend that I have my own Sun workstation, but I assure you it is an amazing program with tons of tweakable features. It is produced by Hummingbird Communications. Exceed Product Link
It seems that all sorts of console games are sold as single CD's. There is no reason that PC games can't be sold in such a way. The only difference is that historically PC games included lots of documentation and goodies, just as console games did. However, the marketing wizards figured out that people don't read instructions for console games, and they never have problems with sound/video cards.
When are PC game companies going to realize that their consumers are no more inclined to read documentation, and that it is much cheaper for them to just sell the CD's. No one reads the documentation unless they have a problem, and it could just as easily be on the CD as an html document. Such is the case with the great game Settlers. The box is just a waste of material. Since the PC market is mostly Windows based, there need be no fear of the user lacking a web-browser (just Try to delete Explorer).
but if Microsoft splits up a lot of businesses will be spending even more money on software that works less well and that doesn't interface that great.
This is the whole point! A monopolistic company inherently produces inferior products at greater costs to the consumer. A breakup of the monopoly can only serve the needs of the consumer. Companies will have to offer better products for cheaper prices to survive. Much fewer M$ millionaires, but better products.
Lets face it, the software industry is still a young one, but it is changing as huge numbers of people retrain themselves in needed skills, that is one reason there is such underemployment in low-wage jobs. As software companies have to become more competitive, jobs will be much less cushy, but better products will be produced for less cost to the consumer.
Consider phone service, does anyone else remember when the phone company owned all the phones, and they sucked. Now phones can do all kinds of amazing things and they are very cheap by comparison. Long distance and international rates are much lower and now there so many new services (caller ID, voice mail, *69, etc). In 5 years we will be amazed at how awesome, cheap, integrated and efficient all the Office Spin offs are, especially the ones that run on Linux.
Now, I assume that ingesting the neurotransmitters would cause them to break down. However, with all the current power juices out there supposedly providing intellectual stimulation, wouldn't it be possible to synthesize this NMDA neurotransmitter and give it to people in injections. Who cares about the mice, as long as it is known to work in humans to increase memory and facilitate learning, then lets get some!
My idea: since the gene has already been isolated, just put this gene into some common bacterial DNA. The bacteria will produce lots of the stuff, just isolate it somehow (centrifuge, etc), purify and then bottle the stuff. Maybe it will need to be refrigerated and have a short shelf life like insulin, but whatever. It'll still be valuable even if it has to be frozen in liquid nitrogen.
Now who wouldn't pay for a super drug that actually increases brain power? Use it before cramming for finals, before taking a standardized test, before a technical interview, etc.
Now the FDA takes forever to approve drugs, and rightly so. However, this is a natural part of the human body, and maybe not so dangerous. Also, put the manufacturing plant in Mexico or Brazil where you can buy all kinds of things like viagra and penicillin over the counter.
So who's going to go look for venture capital with me. The IPO is in a month and a half!
I have had nothing but problems with my Roadrunner. It would be very hard for me to go back to a (now) exceedingly slow modem, but there are still many problems that I have had. I lose connection all the time for brief intervals (30 - 60 seconds approximately) all the time, and I have had numerous problems with billing. There phone based customer service sucks, and all in all I am very annoyed with Mediaone. Unfortunately, they have the cable monopoly in my area. That is what is annoying to me. There are town laws only allowing the one cable provider. This kind of thing is foolish. They enjoy a government regulated monopoly, which allows them to have a crappy product and worse customer service. Does anyone else share these problems? The fact that AT&T is going to have to reduce the Mediaone empire makes me nothing but happy.
Why is there not mention of a sattelite link? What happened to those Iridium sattelites? If they cool link up with whatever company was buying the Iridium Sattelites, or at perhaps lauch some of their own (ie via one of the commercial companies that launches rockets) they could sell proprietary hardware to link with the sattelites...jamming is a possibility, but only locally. There are international regs controlling this. As long as they obey international law with regards to signal transmission, they should be alright
The law does lump people who break the law into the overarching category of "lawbreakers"; however, it certainly divides that up into felonies and misdemeanors, and further divides up the felonies into different classes. There is also tort law and the whole idea of liabilities. I think that civil justice can be much more painful to spammers than whatever criminal penalties would be assessed (they would be very light since the crime not inherently harmful). If automatic class action suits could be filed so that every person who receives a piece of spam from a spammer is owed $.05, I think the world would be a much better place. Not to mention that anyone with accounts on AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo mail would have an wonderful new revenue stream.
I don't think there is anything wrong with having bounties for people who catch criminals, at any level of crime. It has been shown time and time again that what prevents crime is strict enforcement rather than harsh penalties. No criminal does his crime if he thinks he is going to be caught. If we have a problem with it being a crime we should decrimininalize it rather than being hypocritical and not seriously enforcing it.
Encouraging every citizen to be on the look out for crimes in progress merely amplifies everyone's civil duty and reduces the price of hiring more law officers. The only problems to be avoided are people potentially being "framed" and so forth, but that is already a problem today. That is what insurance fraud investigation is about.
How long will it be before they can actually make a waterproof, shock resistant laptop? Something like that Sony did to do the Walkman with their Sony Sport series.
Does anyone know anything about an effort to make really sturdy laptops? I would imagine there would be a huge market for things like this. I know there are laptops with features like an easily replaceable shield for the monitor. Ones with sealed keyboards to resist Coke and pizza stains, but what about a real honest to god Vaio Sport or something (maybe not in bright yellow, but why not?)