There is obviously some money for the research, and a zoo would bring in enough revenue to help offset research costs, but how much do you think someone might bid to be the first person in 10,000 years to hunt and kill a woolly mammoth?
Interesting question from this. After you clone it, is it an endangered species?
Also, did they find a male or a female? Assuming mammoths use an XY sex signature, would it be possible to engineer a female if it was male blood by putting two X genes together? Although it might be unviable if there's genetic defects in the X. Getting two of the same exact chromosome is generally bad...
Have you ever seen what it takes to get an elephant certified as "free range"? Seriously, if they have 5 feet to move in each direction, that qualifies. Regulation in the elephant farming industry is a joke.
I know it's wrong, but personally I like elephant veal. Yeah, I know. Some AC is going to point out that technically veal has to be made out of cows. But you know what I mean. There isn't an English word for "elephant veal."
So, we're gonna be where people come after the disaster?
Yeah. There's bound to be money in that
Huh. Just gotta ask -- wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask -- How much did the Superdome people make off that whole thing? Cause I can't see us beating their volume.
I work with a health IT company that's trying to give doctors better tools to solve and treat disease.
That's cool. I'm between jobs right now, so I have a lot of time on my hands. But the bright side is that just a few dollars from my unemployment check will buy a whole bunch of eggs, so I'm cool.
Say, why don't you tell me where you live, and I'll come over and we'll talk about that disease treating thingie you're interested in.
Projects like this are a great way to train new engineers for small embedded systems. There is a lot of work out there on 8-bit systems with a couple k of program space and a few hundred bytes of ram. At my place we actively collect books that targeted advanced computer programming techniques in the early 80's, because they line up good with the resources we typically have on a microcontroller that costs $1.27 now.
For example, given a 128x96 black and white LCD, create an algorithm that will draw a line between any two points. Oh, and you can only use integer math, and we'd prefer it if you kept division operations to a minimum, because we have to do division through a software library call...
The old-timers did that stuff in their spare time 30 years ago.
Trade secrets, such as formulas and manufacturing processes are the responsibility of the individual companies to protect, not government.
I would agree that it's up to them to protect themselves from other companies. But individual companies don't stand a chance of protecting against attacks from the resources available to a nation-state. It is reasonable to expect our government to take action to prevent hacking by the Chinese military and other government sponsored efforts, in the same way that we would it expect it to protect some office building in Hawaii from being burglurized by Chinese special forces.
Exactly. I am too young to remember, but my guess is there was a time when people were crying bloody murder about having a dynamic IP address, and bitching about how you had to pay extra for a static one.
The ironic thing is that the rants that follow are becoming almost as predictable as the xkcd posts. Soon it will be Oblig XKCD, followed immediatly by Oblig XKCD Rant...
To be fair, there's not a lot of shame in that. Look at most market leading companies over the last 50 years. Many innovative companies fit that description. Kodak? Sony? Maybe Apple in 5 years... It doesn't mean they're bad, it just means its hard to be #1 forever. We can learn a lot from that.
Oh, and also really it's best if you have just one person run a company. Learn that too.:-)
Yes, but Chat apps are priced closer to the way that the water coming out of your garden hose is. As opposed to SMS, which is priced like bottled water.
ACs posting Pedantic flaws in my metaphore in 3...2...1...
What they need to "invent" is a messaging *platform* that does it all for you (i.e. collects the message data from different providers on a server and streams it together where it can be read by any number of compatible clients)...
Where the hell is that dripping sound coming from? Oh. Never mind. It's an army of "Terms of Service" laywers all salivating in unison.
It is indeed less efficient to put it on trucks. And it costs more. But typically the business case is that the speed with which you get your goods offsets the increase in cost. There's a latency involved with queueing the cargo on a train (even if you use Stacktrain type containers that move from truck to train without unloading). Businesses increasingly run on Just-In-Time type deliveries, which make this latency unacceptable. We use a lot of trucks now instead of shipping by train for this reason. Taking the driver out of the equation would make the trucks even more desirable. It's gonna happen.
At some point the 'haves' need the 'have nots' to have money. Filthy rich people don't continue to get filthy rich off of one another.
But not all the 'haves' see things this way. People tend to measure their wealth by comparing against others - typically their peers, rather than against an absolute standard. An american with a small house, a used car, and only one TV will tend to tell you that they're not very well off, despite the fact that as a percentile of the world population, they're very well off.
The economy is a game. But it's a funny game that is meant to be played forever. But the problem is that we're approaching having people "win" the game. And they want to win it. Have you ever badly beaten a child at the game "Monopoly"? It's much the same thing. And you run the risk of the losing player becoming so frustrated that they simply toss the board from the table. And they destroy your hard earned houses and hotels in the process. This metaphore scares the hell out of me.
Robot energy is nearly free. $100 for a barrel of oil will buy you a shit-ton of energy. On the other hand, I spent nearly that same $100 for my groceries for the week. And calories in those groceries are orders of magnitude less than a barrel of oil. That's one of the reasons you employ robots instead of humans.
So do I get (or forced) to be the one that stays home because I'm not needed.
This same argument is pretty applicable to capitalism right now. Take a look at the long term unemployed here in the US. They're forced to stay home because they aren't (percieved as being) needed.
Even better, take a look at Europe, where unemployment among new college grads is near 50% in some cases. These are motivated people who have followed the rules, and done what society has told them that they're supposed to do. But it isn't paying off. Sooner or later, they're going to decide that following the rules is for chumps. And that's when the real trouble is gonna start.
Maybe. Or Something like it. The interesting question is "What happens to people we just don't need anymore?" What do they do? McDonalds has a robot that flips burgers, but hasn't rolled it out because customers find the burger less appealing if it's entirely cooked by machine. What happens to people who work fast food and similar McJobs when the public accepts it and those jobs go away? It really isn't practical to say that they should build burger making robots. If they could do that, they wouldn't be flipping burgers.
Capitalism works when nearly everyone has a place that they can fit in the economy. There used to be a phrase "The world needs ditch-diggers, too". But now we don't. We need one guy operating a backhoe that does the work of 20 men with shovels. And the backhoe may not always need that one guy in the future.
This will really hit home in 10 to 15 years when Long-Haul trucks (not local deliveries, that's harder) are automated. The technology for driving coast-to-coast on I-70 isn't that demanding. Infinity has an SUV that can already stay in it's lane, and fully stop the car to avoid hitting stopped traffic ahead of it. It's not hard to see a truck pulled into a truck-stop by a human, it's dropped off and reconnected to an automated rig which is piloted by remote by a human until it gets on the interstate. Then it self-pilots for days until it ends up at another such stop in california.
If this comes true, thousands of middle class families will be destroyed, because there isn't an obvious place for those blue-collar drivers to go and make similar income. Society simply won't need them anymore. And whomever owns the automated trucks will increase their profit.
Eventually, either wealth redistribution or revolt will happen.
That's brilliant. The idea that I can buy a 100W usb wall wart to plug my laptop into instead of a proprietary dell adapter. That could do for laptops what USB charging did for cell phones...
USB has always had the idea of different grades of cable. The 1.5MBps interface for keyboards and mice was specifically created in part so that you could use a really thin, crappy cable leading to the mouse. That way you didn't have to use the better cable required for 10MBps. Power will be the same way, although I'll be interested to see how they keep you from trying to pull 20A through a crappy 26 gauge cable ebay unbranded cable.
That makes me wonder, has anyone created a PSU that dynamically draws power as its needs rise?
Yes, all of them do this already, unless I misunderstand you. A switching power supply only pulls what it needs from the wall (plus a bit of inefficiency) to supply what the computer demands. Check out the 80-Plus standards for an idea of different efficiencies at different percentages of total load.
I'm guessing what we'll see is hubs that support this, with their own power brick. You plug the hub into the PC to deal with data, and the device into the Hub. This is already the case if you want to support multiple devices that add up to more than 500mA. You have to plug them into a powered hub.
The laptop has the ability to just say no. Properly behaved devices on the current USB bus must ask the host if they can switch from the minimal 100mA to the 500mA current limit. If the host says no, you're not supposed to do it. If the printer pulls it anyway, that's a problem with the printer, not the laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
Bring it on. If I have to shove the fucking network admin over one more fucking wall...
There is obviously some money for the research, and a zoo would bring in enough revenue to help offset research costs, but how much do you think someone might bid to be the first person in 10,000 years to hunt and kill a woolly mammoth?
Interesting question from this. After you clone it, is it an endangered species?
Also, did they find a male or a female? Assuming mammoths use an XY sex signature, would it be possible to engineer a female if it was male blood by putting two X genes together? Although it might be unviable if there's genetic defects in the X. Getting two of the same exact chromosome is generally bad...
Have you ever seen what it takes to get an elephant certified as "free range"? Seriously, if they have 5 feet to move in each direction, that qualifies. Regulation in the elephant farming industry is a joke.
I know it's wrong, but personally I like elephant veal. Yeah, I know. Some AC is going to point out that technically veal has to be made out of cows. But you know what I mean. There isn't an English word for "elephant veal."
So, we're gonna be where people come after the disaster?
Yeah. There's bound to be money in that
Huh. Just gotta ask -- wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask -- How much did the Superdome people make off that whole thing? Cause I can't see us beating their volume.
Don't listen to the Analysts. You guys are every bit as good as Amazon. But what's the one thing Amazon's got that you ain't got? DATACENTERS!"
The whole thing seems like an April Fool's joke, until you realize that these are the people who thought that buying K-Mart was a good idea.
I work with a health IT company that's trying to give doctors better tools to solve and treat disease.
That's cool. I'm between jobs right now, so I have a lot of time on my hands. But the bright side is that just a few dollars from my unemployment check will buy a whole bunch of eggs, so I'm cool.
Say, why don't you tell me where you live, and I'll come over and we'll talk about that disease treating thingie you're interested in.
Projects like this are a great way to train new engineers for small embedded systems. There is a lot of work out there on 8-bit systems with a couple k of program space and a few hundred bytes of ram. At my place we actively collect books that targeted advanced computer programming techniques in the early 80's, because they line up good with the resources we typically have on a microcontroller that costs $1.27 now .
For example, given a 128x96 black and white LCD, create an algorithm that will draw a line between any two points. Oh, and you can only use integer math, and we'd prefer it if you kept division operations to a minimum, because we have to do division through a software library call...
The old-timers did that stuff in their spare time 30 years ago.
Trade secrets, such as formulas and manufacturing processes are the responsibility of the individual companies to protect, not government.
I would agree that it's up to them to protect themselves from other companies. But individual companies don't stand a chance of protecting against attacks from the resources available to a nation-state. It is reasonable to expect our government to take action to prevent hacking by the Chinese military and other government sponsored efforts, in the same way that we would it expect it to protect some office building in Hawaii from being burglurized by Chinese special forces.
Exactly. I am too young to remember, but my guess is there was a time when people were crying bloody murder about having a dynamic IP address, and bitching about how you had to pay extra for a static one.
Or make more little flies?
The ironic thing is that the rants that follow are becoming almost as predictable as the xkcd posts. Soon it will be Oblig XKCD, followed immediatly by Oblig XKCD Rant...
To be fair, there's not a lot of shame in that. Look at most market leading companies over the last 50 years. Many innovative companies fit that description. Kodak? Sony? Maybe Apple in 5 years... It doesn't mean they're bad, it just means its hard to be #1 forever. We can learn a lot from that.
:-)
Oh, and also really it's best if you have just one person run a company. Learn that too.
Yes, but Chat apps are priced closer to the way that the water coming out of your garden hose is. As opposed to SMS, which is priced like bottled water.
ACs posting Pedantic flaws in my metaphore in 3...2...1...
What they need to "invent" is a messaging *platform* that does it all for you (i.e. collects the message data from different providers on a server and streams it together where it can be read by any number of compatible clients)...
Where the hell is that dripping sound coming from? Oh. Never mind. It's an army of "Terms of Service" laywers all salivating in unison.
So... You're saying balkanization is a good thing?
It is indeed less efficient to put it on trucks. And it costs more. But typically the business case is that the speed with which you get your goods offsets the increase in cost. There's a latency involved with queueing the cargo on a train (even if you use Stacktrain type containers that move from truck to train without unloading). Businesses increasingly run on Just-In-Time type deliveries, which make this latency unacceptable. We use a lot of trucks now instead of shipping by train for this reason. Taking the driver out of the equation would make the trucks even more desirable. It's gonna happen.
At some point the 'haves' need the 'have nots' to have money. Filthy rich people don't continue to get filthy rich off of one another.
But not all the 'haves' see things this way. People tend to measure their wealth by comparing against others - typically their peers, rather than against an absolute standard. An american with a small house, a used car, and only one TV will tend to tell you that they're not very well off, despite the fact that as a percentile of the world population, they're very well off.
The economy is a game. But it's a funny game that is meant to be played forever. But the problem is that we're approaching having people "win" the game. And they want to win it. Have you ever badly beaten a child at the game "Monopoly"? It's much the same thing. And you run the risk of the losing player becoming so frustrated that they simply toss the board from the table. And they destroy your hard earned houses and hotels in the process. This metaphore scares the hell out of me.
Robot energy is nearly free. $100 for a barrel of oil will buy you a shit-ton of energy. On the other hand, I spent nearly that same $100 for my groceries for the week. And calories in those groceries are orders of magnitude less than a barrel of oil. That's one of the reasons you employ robots instead of humans.
Socialism.
So do I get (or forced) to be the one that stays home because I'm not needed.
This same argument is pretty applicable to capitalism right now. Take a look at the long term unemployed here in the US. They're forced to stay home because they aren't (percieved as being) needed.
Even better, take a look at Europe, where unemployment among new college grads is near 50% in some cases. These are motivated people who have followed the rules, and done what society has told them that they're supposed to do. But it isn't paying off. Sooner or later, they're going to decide that following the rules is for chumps. And that's when the real trouble is gonna start.
Socialism.
Maybe. Or Something like it. The interesting question is "What happens to people we just don't need anymore?" What do they do? McDonalds has a robot that flips burgers, but hasn't rolled it out because customers find the burger less appealing if it's entirely cooked by machine. What happens to people who work fast food and similar McJobs when the public accepts it and those jobs go away? It really isn't practical to say that they should build burger making robots. If they could do that, they wouldn't be flipping burgers.
Capitalism works when nearly everyone has a place that they can fit in the economy. There used to be a phrase "The world needs ditch-diggers, too". But now we don't. We need one guy operating a backhoe that does the work of 20 men with shovels. And the backhoe may not always need that one guy in the future.
This will really hit home in 10 to 15 years when Long-Haul trucks (not local deliveries, that's harder) are automated. The technology for driving coast-to-coast on I-70 isn't that demanding. Infinity has an SUV that can already stay in it's lane, and fully stop the car to avoid hitting stopped traffic ahead of it. It's not hard to see a truck pulled into a truck-stop by a human, it's dropped off and reconnected to an automated rig which is piloted by remote by a human until it gets on the interstate. Then it self-pilots for days until it ends up at another such stop in california.
If this comes true, thousands of middle class families will be destroyed, because there isn't an obvious place for those blue-collar drivers to go and make similar income. Society simply won't need them anymore. And whomever owns the automated trucks will increase their profit.
Eventually, either wealth redistribution or revolt will happen.
That's brilliant. The idea that I can buy a 100W usb wall wart to plug my laptop into instead of a proprietary dell adapter. That could do for laptops what USB charging did for cell phones...
USB has always had the idea of different grades of cable. The 1.5MBps interface for keyboards and mice was specifically created in part so that you could use a really thin, crappy cable leading to the mouse. That way you didn't have to use the better cable required for 10MBps. Power will be the same way, although I'll be interested to see how they keep you from trying to pull 20A through a crappy 26 gauge cable ebay unbranded cable.
That makes me wonder, has anyone created a PSU that dynamically draws power as its needs rise?
Yes, all of them do this already, unless I misunderstand you. A switching power supply only pulls what it needs from the wall (plus a bit of inefficiency) to supply what the computer demands. Check out the 80-Plus standards for an idea of different efficiencies at different percentages of total load.
I'm guessing what we'll see is hubs that support this, with their own power brick. You plug the hub into the PC to deal with data, and the device into the Hub. This is already the case if you want to support multiple devices that add up to more than 500mA. You have to plug them into a powered hub.
The laptop has the ability to just say no. Properly behaved devices on the current USB bus must ask the host if they can switch from the minimal 100mA to the 500mA current limit. If the host says no, you're not supposed to do it. If the printer pulls it anyway, that's a problem with the printer, not the laptop.