Fusion isn't some magic free energy source. Fuel is not the major cost of energy. Infrastructure and maintenance are the main source of energy. Fusion, let alone any free energy source, wouldn't actually lower the cost of energy much. People would still need to have to build desalination plants, power lines, roads, etc. Hydroponics will use just as much if not more chemicals than normal. Vertical gardens and robots are a pipe dream that would cause more enviromental damage in building them than our current growing methods. Energy has nothing to do with people dumping their garbage. We could get the same benefits from nuclear energy if it would actually solve anything.
"Fusion isn't some magic free energy source" - true, but that's like saying that fire isn't some magic heat source... it may as well be for a caveman.
Of course fuel is the major cost of energy, see for example coal, gas, nuclear. Renewables are a different case, but the amount of energy is typically orders of magnitude less, so the "fuel" cost (not sure how that would be defined) is negligible compared to the equipment, but there is going to be a maximum amount of energy to be extracted that doesn't scale up - i.e. you can't just throw more coal onto the fire, you're stuck with the amount of sunlight, wind, wave energy, etc. that you have.
Vertical gardens would cause more damage than mega-farms? why?
Energy has a lot to do with dumping their garbage, although I do think it might have an opposite effect to the GPs suggestion (more energy, more waste produced)
It feels like I just read your post the other day.
Really, contrast? I think there is an element of advertisers wanting their ads to look legitimate - there are many competing interests. I can still tell the ads on google, maybe because I'm young enough. That is not quite enough for me to consider google evil.
DRM - drm still sucks, will continue to suck, and I don't see the end any time soon. I don't blame Chrome from DRM, I don't get why you do, other than saying that chrome is going to make sure that netflix works?
agreed that the web is owned by the corporates, and pretty much everything else is owned by the corporates...
It's simpler than people 'believing in "open" and "do no evil"' - people use whatever is available and good enough for what they need. You don't have to believe in Google to benefit from gmail.
we'll come up with another arbitrarily determined valuation system to peg individual worth to
I'd say that this is well underway. Our wealthiest and most popular people are far removed from the people that perform the most "work", especially in a more conventional use of the word work.
I'd pay $10 a month - the problem is this: I know that if they charged $10 a month, most people would leave, and the email service would stagnate. The whole reason gmail is the best is because they have so much continual improvement. As soon as that stops, I'm going to move on to the new best thing. I did that when MS stopped being the best, and I will when google does as well. At the moment, I think the best thing going is Google Apps, running in Chrome, on a Macbook Pro. I'm not religious about it, I just haven't found anything I like better. I'm open to change though.
At the start of the book, the authors use the term acclimation to refer to the plateaus that many of us reach. This is the inability to notice changes in the environment around us.
No it isn't... acclimation is when something settles in to new surroundings, it has nothing to do with ability to notice changes.
there simply will not be ANY JOBS for the population of this planet.
This is wrong - there will be new jobs. Think of it like any other advancement - increases in efficiency will make new possibilities and we will have even more to do. The jobs that can be automated can go away, and there will still be plenty to do. When was the last time some time saving advancement gave you more free time? Examples that come to mind are interstate highways, air travel, telecommunications, copy machines, printing presses, etc. These big advancements all disrupted what was there before, but it is never like "Hey, now that we can print these books on this press, we don't need monks to transcribe books anymore, we can just wake up, live with family, go to bed, repeat"
First off, I admire this effort and the choice of MIT license, but I am also wondering whether the source is already available to anyone who plays the games, since they are run on the client? Am I missing something?
what about generators that run off of cigarette lighters?
Here's my attempt at a calculation:
Butane lighter ~ 70kJ (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100426110511AAIvSgM)
hmm... I also see 600J, here (http://cadlab6.mit.edu/2.009.wiki/anchor/index.php?title=Butane_cigarette_lighter)
which is it???
assuming 50% efficiency, that leaves 35 kilojoules = 9.7 Wh
or from the second reference 300J = 0.083 Wh
the iPhone 5 has 5.45 Wh battery...
I never am able to get a straight answer - if you put out a popular indie game, for example, and you decided to make it free and ad supported, for example, let's say you get 100k people to download it, and 10k people are playing it regularly
what kind of money do you make? $100/month, $1000/month, $10k/month? anybody know?
Yet suckers keep paying money for $500 speaker cables and $1000 bottles of wine. Just stoking ego at that point.
I completely agree about the speaker cables - and while I don't have enough money to spend $1000 on a bottle of wine to know for sure, I do think that there is a psychological phenomenon similar to a placebo effect that actually makes drinking the expensive wine more pleasurable. Here's some cool research: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/baba_wine.html
You're still probably right about stroking ego, but if I had billions of dollars, I might try the $1000 bottle.:)
Another guy had 8GB of photos of his kids and family.
You don't sound like you were trying to be malicious, but didn't you consider not snooping on other peoples machines?
I still like the idea of having unlocked doors and not needing security systems on houses, etc. I expect other people to have a moral compass and not walk in and go through my stuff. I get your point, but I wish you would elevate your mentality to where you aren't violating peoples privacy and feeling justified because they didn't actively prevent you from doing it.
Which programming languages will be the most influential for progress towards the singularity? Will there be particularly important methodologies? (i.e. object-oriented, functional, asynchronous, whatever you call Lisp, strongly (or not) typed, etc. )
I believe most computations of the bound state are currently just assuming things about them (charge is a point source, nothing about quarks).
This is my suspicion as well, specifically about the charge distribution. I think a 4% effect could easily be explained using a model with distributed charge.
I have to agree here as well. You can't write on an iPad as it is. I'm curious about the Galaxy Note series - anybody know how good the
stylus is? Resolution or input rates? I think frame rates of apps are too low for handwriting, so the hardware will have to help. I'm thinking around mouse rates 1sample/8ms might be enough.
In economics people like to discuss job creators and wealth movement, trickle-up and trickle-down, the loss of businesses, poor people and rich people... but they fail to understand wealth. Take the "shop locally" thing... if you have a local bookstore versus Amazon, people tell you to shop locally because it "keeps the money in the community." Problem is the local bookstore is crap, they order from the big publishers and distributors, etc; some folks argue Walmart or B&N are as bad as Amazon and not like a local bookstore, but their stores still pay local taxes on their income, they still pay rent, hire sales people, and order from the same distributors.
Now let's say you order from Amazon because it's $10 cheaper. That money leaves the local community, but $10 stays... you're $10 wealthier. The local bookstore has terrible selection and is expensive... it goes out of business. Meanwhile you've got a local farmer's market and you shop there with the extra $10 you have. That's wealth creation: you have the same goods (a book) plus more money ($10) to buy other goods (fresh food). If this is the general trend, the Farmer's Market garners that much more business, expands, and replaces the local book shop's place in the community--the community demand for a farmer's market was higher than a local bookstore, the community is now wealthier.
The problem is that the local bookstore doesn't have to be crap to go out of business, and why does someone who decides to save $10 by buying from amazon decide to shop at a farmer's market (less convenient, can be more expensive) instead of a grocery store? I know you have a good point about what makes the community wealthier, but there are advantages to having retail stores in your area beyond price and selection - I like having a downtown to stroll around and look at things in shops, and I know I'm not alone - I don't want to see a bunch of failing businesses with scary homeless people begging for change (this is the way it's headed) with the "normal" people isolated in their suburban house getting goods shipped to the house.
I wouldn't really describe this as confirming the arrow of time.
The really powerful arrow of time is the thermodynamic one. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases. This thermodynamic arrow is essentially the same arrow as the psychological one, which allows us to remember the past but not the future, and all the other ones we see in nature, such as the laws of black hole thermodynamics, which say that the area of a black hole's event horizon always grows with time. This group of time-arrows, which are all essentially the same time-arrow, appear to occur because the big bang was fine-tuned to be extremely low in entropy, with its gravitational-wave degrees of freedom inactive. Nobody knows why we had a low-entropy big bang, when a random choice of initial conditions would be overwhelmingly more likely to produce a maximum-entropy one. (In particular, inflation doesn't explain it. Also, statistical mechanics doesn't explain it, because to produce the second law from statistical mechanics, you need to assume a low-entropy initial state.)
Would cooling from expansion and corresponding symmetry breaking explain it? Why would the big bang have to be a low-entropy state in any global sense (and what difference would that even make?), wouldn't entropy still be able to increase from any initial point?
This paper is about an arrow of time that is obscure and completely unrelated to the others. It has to do with the weak nuclear force. Unlike the others, it has essentially no effect on the world we see around us.
Is it possible that this observation is related to an increase of entropy that is not properly described by the particles in the model?
this. Especially since Fed-ex and other couriers are likely going to stay on main routes, and so the mapping should be much better from a diverse set of cars (drivers with google phones.)
I know this has been discussed too often, but I personally avoid GPL and consider it a virus. I think you have it backwards:
The limitations of the GPL exist for a reason, without them it would be too easy to "embrace and extend" any open source solution and we would either be back to square one, or spend all our time trying to reinvent the wheel....
While I understand your point, which would be true if everyone was working on GPL'ed code, in practice, incompatible licenses directly lead to people spending time "reinventing the wheel". Even though code is available with a restrictive license, they rewrite it to avoid the licensing issues.
I think we would be better off with people just published code with no restrictions - how bad would that really be, and for who??
Slashdot Mirror
Fusion isn't some magic free energy source. Fuel is not the major cost of energy. Infrastructure and maintenance are the main source of energy. Fusion, let alone any free energy source, wouldn't actually lower the cost of energy much. People would still need to have to build desalination plants, power lines, roads, etc. Hydroponics will use just as much if not more chemicals than normal. Vertical gardens and robots are a pipe dream that would cause more enviromental damage in building them than our current growing methods. Energy has nothing to do with people dumping their garbage. We could get the same benefits from nuclear energy if it would actually solve anything.
"Fusion isn't some magic free energy source" - true, but that's like saying that fire isn't some magic heat source... it may as well be for a caveman. Of course fuel is the major cost of energy, see for example coal, gas, nuclear. Renewables are a different case, but the amount of energy is typically orders of magnitude less, so the "fuel" cost (not sure how that would be defined) is negligible compared to the equipment, but there is going to be a maximum amount of energy to be extracted that doesn't scale up - i.e. you can't just throw more coal onto the fire, you're stuck with the amount of sunlight, wind, wave energy, etc. that you have. Vertical gardens would cause more damage than mega-farms? why? Energy has a lot to do with dumping their garbage, although I do think it might have an opposite effect to the GPs suggestion (more energy, more waste produced)
It feels like I just read your post the other day.
Really, contrast? I think there is an element of advertisers wanting their ads to look legitimate - there are many competing interests. I can still tell the ads on google, maybe because I'm young enough. That is not quite enough for me to consider google evil.
DRM - drm still sucks, will continue to suck, and I don't see the end any time soon. I don't blame Chrome from DRM, I don't get why you do, other than saying that chrome is going to make sure that netflix works?
agreed that the web is owned by the corporates, and pretty much everything else is owned by the corporates...
It's simpler than people 'believing in "open" and "do no evil"' - people use whatever is available and good enough for what they need. You don't have to believe in Google to benefit from gmail.
we'll come up with another arbitrarily determined valuation system to peg individual worth to
I'd say that this is well underway. Our wealthiest and most popular people are far removed from the people that perform the most "work", especially in a more conventional use of the word work.
I'd pay $10 a month - the problem is this: I know that if they charged $10 a month, most people would leave, and the email service would stagnate. The whole reason gmail is the best is because they have so much continual improvement. As soon as that stops, I'm going to move on to the new best thing. I did that when MS stopped being the best, and I will when google does as well. At the moment, I think the best thing going is Google Apps, running in Chrome, on a Macbook Pro. I'm not religious about it, I just haven't found anything I like better. I'm open to change though.
At the start of the book, the authors use the term acclimation to refer to the plateaus that many of us reach. This is the inability to notice changes in the environment around us.
No it isn't... acclimation is when something settles in to new surroundings, it has nothing to do with ability to notice changes.
there simply will not be ANY JOBS for the population of this planet.
This is wrong - there will be new jobs. Think of it like any other advancement - increases in efficiency will make new possibilities and we will have even more to do. The jobs that can be automated can go away, and there will still be plenty to do. When was the last time some time saving advancement gave you more free time? Examples that come to mind are interstate highways, air travel, telecommunications, copy machines, printing presses, etc. These big advancements all disrupted what was there before, but it is never like "Hey, now that we can print these books on this press, we don't need monks to transcribe books anymore, we can just wake up, live with family, go to bed, repeat"
I'm with you on every point except J.J. Abrams - I think he is great. Granted, I was a fan of Lost.
First off, I admire this effort and the choice of MIT license, but I am also wondering whether the source is already available to anyone who plays the games, since they are run on the client? Am I missing something?
what about generators that run off of cigarette lighters? Here's my attempt at a calculation:
Butane lighter ~ 70kJ (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100426110511AAIvSgM)
hmm... I also see 600J, here (http://cadlab6.mit.edu/2.009.wiki/anchor/index.php?title=Butane_cigarette_lighter)
which is it???
assuming 50% efficiency, that leaves 35 kilojoules = 9.7 Wh
or from the second reference 300J = 0.083 Wh
the iPhone 5 has 5.45 Wh battery...
I never am able to get a straight answer - if you put out a popular indie game, for example, and you decided to make it free and ad supported, for example, let's say you get 100k people to download it, and 10k people are playing it regularly what kind of money do you make? $100/month, $1000/month, $10k/month? anybody know?
Yet suckers keep paying money for $500 speaker cables and $1000 bottles of wine. Just stoking ego at that point.
I completely agree about the speaker cables - and while I don't have enough money to spend $1000 on a bottle of wine to know for sure, I do think that there is a psychological phenomenon similar to a placebo effect that actually makes drinking the expensive wine more pleasurable. Here's some cool research: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/baba_wine.html :)
You're still probably right about stroking ego, but if I had billions of dollars, I might try the $1000 bottle.
don't judge people by their titles, judge by behavior, if you must judge. It doesn't sound to me like he/she has anything to be ashamed of.
It's nice to see checks and balances. I wondered what happened to those.
Another guy had 8GB of photos of his kids and family.
You don't sound like you were trying to be malicious, but didn't you consider not snooping on other peoples machines? I still like the idea of having unlocked doors and not needing security systems on houses, etc. I expect other people to have a moral compass and not walk in and go through my stuff. I get your point, but I wish you would elevate your mentality to where you aren't violating peoples privacy and feeling justified because they didn't actively prevent you from doing it.
Which programming languages will be the most influential for progress towards the singularity? Will there be particularly important methodologies? (i.e. object-oriented, functional, asynchronous, whatever you call Lisp, strongly (or not) typed, etc. )
I believe most computations of the bound state are currently just assuming things about them (charge is a point source, nothing about quarks).
This is my suspicion as well, specifically about the charge distribution. I think a 4% effect could easily be explained using a model with distributed charge.
I have to agree here as well. You can't write on an iPad as it is. I'm curious about the Galaxy Note series - anybody know how good the stylus is? Resolution or input rates? I think frame rates of apps are too low for handwriting, so the hardware will have to help. I'm thinking around mouse rates 1sample/8ms might be enough.
You're right, and I'd switch to it on one of my machines immediately. There is nothing I particularly enjoy about Ubuntu.
It's also about convenience - check out these "cash for your used iPhone devices" http://www.ecoatm.com/ here's the search on their page for close to New York: http://www.ecoatm.com/find-a-location.html?location=New+York%2C+New+York&x=43&y=17 They may as well have their animated robot look like the hamburgler...
In economics people like to discuss job creators and wealth movement, trickle-up and trickle-down, the loss of businesses, poor people and rich people... but they fail to understand wealth. Take the "shop locally" thing... if you have a local bookstore versus Amazon, people tell you to shop locally because it "keeps the money in the community." Problem is the local bookstore is crap, they order from the big publishers and distributors, etc; some folks argue Walmart or B&N are as bad as Amazon and not like a local bookstore, but their stores still pay local taxes on their income, they still pay rent, hire sales people, and order from the same distributors. Now let's say you order from Amazon because it's $10 cheaper. That money leaves the local community, but $10 stays ... you're $10 wealthier. The local bookstore has terrible selection and is expensive... it goes out of business. Meanwhile you've got a local farmer's market and you shop there with the extra $10 you have. That's wealth creation: you have the same goods (a book) plus more money ($10) to buy other goods (fresh food). If this is the general trend, the Farmer's Market garners that much more business, expands, and replaces the local book shop's place in the community--the community demand for a farmer's market was higher than a local bookstore, the community is now wealthier.
The problem is that the local bookstore doesn't have to be crap to go out of business, and why does someone who decides to save $10 by buying from amazon decide to shop at a farmer's market (less convenient, can be more expensive) instead of a grocery store? I know you have a good point about what makes the community wealthier, but there are advantages to having retail stores in your area beyond price and selection - I like having a downtown to stroll around and look at things in shops, and I know I'm not alone - I don't want to see a bunch of failing businesses with scary homeless people begging for change (this is the way it's headed) with the "normal" people isolated in their suburban house getting goods shipped to the house.
sadly, robots fighting robots does seem inevitable at this point, although humans are still likely to be participating.
I wouldn't really describe this as confirming the arrow of time.
The really powerful arrow of time is the thermodynamic one. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases. This thermodynamic arrow is essentially the same arrow as the psychological one, which allows us to remember the past but not the future, and all the other ones we see in nature, such as the laws of black hole thermodynamics, which say that the area of a black hole's event horizon always grows with time. This group of time-arrows, which are all essentially the same time-arrow, appear to occur because the big bang was fine-tuned to be extremely low in entropy, with its gravitational-wave degrees of freedom inactive. Nobody knows why we had a low-entropy big bang, when a random choice of initial conditions would be overwhelmingly more likely to produce a maximum-entropy one. (In particular, inflation doesn't explain it. Also, statistical mechanics doesn't explain it, because to produce the second law from statistical mechanics, you need to assume a low-entropy initial state.)
Would cooling from expansion and corresponding symmetry breaking explain it? Why would the big bang have to be a low-entropy state in any global sense (and what difference would that even make?), wouldn't entropy still be able to increase from any initial point?
This paper is about an arrow of time that is obscure and completely unrelated to the others. It has to do with the weak nuclear force. Unlike the others, it has essentially no effect on the world we see around us.
Is it possible that this observation is related to an increase of entropy that is not properly described by the particles in the model?
Ok, I'll bite. All app stores are "just a package manager prettied up". If that is what makes something not a walled garden, then they don't exist.
this. Especially since Fed-ex and other couriers are likely going to stay on main routes, and so the mapping should be much better from a diverse set of cars (drivers with google phones.)
The limitations of the GPL exist for a reason, without them it would be too easy to "embrace and extend" any open source solution and we would either be back to square one, or spend all our time trying to reinvent the wheel....
While I understand your point, which would be true if everyone was working on GPL'ed code, in practice, incompatible licenses directly lead to people spending time "reinventing the wheel". Even though code is available with a restrictive license, they rewrite it to avoid the licensing issues. I think we would be better off with people just published code with no restrictions - how bad would that really be, and for who??