Against both authors, decades/centuries of science fiction have innured us to the basic fact - space travel is HARD. It may very well be that interstellar travel is impossible, as long as we inhabit biological bodies.
Personally, I don't ever think there will ever be any such sort of interstellar war as any of these books. Space is just too big, and it's too expensive to get from one place to another. For that matter, there may well never be any sort of interstellar trade, simply because the transport cost would outweigh just about any cost of goods. So with this in mind, if I really wanted to fight an interstellar war, I'd start with stealthy nanotech in the target's Oort cloud, Kuiper belt or whatever equivalent. The real war would be fought with something more like grey goo, comet and asteroid impacts, or some truly frightening advanced quantum mechanics. ("Anvil of Stars" by Greg Bear)
My other feeling is that we'll either become more peaceful, or we'll never make it to the stars. We don't have a starfaring society, heck we don't even have an interplanetary society, scratch all of that, we barely make it into Earth orbit, with a few small forays beyond. Today's space vehicles are essentially giant well-controlled bombs. Anything in orbit or higher has an incredible amount of potential and/or kinetic energy, and could be considered a weapon if "used properly." We've barely managed to keep from destroying ourselves with the energies we've got at our disposal now. To become a truly interplanetary civilization we need common use of energies somewhere in the realm of 2 orders of magnitude greater. We fuss over nuclear, chemical, and biological materials becoming "terrorist weapons" today. Imagine when we have hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people beyond Earth orbit, not just a fewer than a dozen, and each one has enough potential and/or kinetic energy to be a "weapon of mass destruction."
There's simply no way to keep the cat in the bag. We'll either cure ourselves of most of our violence by the time we're interplanetary, or we won't survive to get there. Oh yeah, I can't see how interstellar travel could be less than at least one order of magnitude beyond that, in energetic terms, perhaps unless we up/download and travel in nonbiological form.
But it is also kind of interesting to look at the ways science fiction authors have used space travel - and war - to explore their own life experiences. As began this thread, "Starship Troopers" was rooted in WWII and "Forever War" was rooted in Viet Nam, and it shows. Another interesting point is how forward-looking Heinlein's technology was, that the superficial trappings of the 2 books were so similar - roughly equivalent spaceships, exoskeletons, etc. Then take a look at Asimov's Foundation novels, original trilogy vs later, and see how 40 years of Earthly progress were mirrored in 500 years of Foundation/Empire progress.
Once I saw that "Starship Troopers" wasn't going to be done in the John Wayne style that would have suited Heinlein well, I began to wish they hadn't done it at all. If you're not going to play it straight, and I'll admit that "Starship Troopers" done straight probably wouldn't sail past the mid 1960's, don't do it. If you want the theme, but want to twist it into modern themes, then do Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War" instead. Where "Starship Troopers" is interstellar war ala WWII, "The Forever War" is interstellar war ala Vietnam, but both are basics of interstellar war, just that the latter is more advanced, as well as more bitter.
And if you just want farce, then Harry Harrison's "Bill, the Galactic Hero" manages to skewer "Starship Troopers", "The Foundation Trilogy", and any number of other stories inhabiting that range, all in the same book.
Oh heck, if you want space opera, it would be great to see something - anything by E.E. Doc Smith turned into a movie. In order to not be downright ludicrous, it would need to be done with tongue heavily in cheek, like "Big Trouble in Little China". (How anyone could say some of those lines, keep it straight, and not crack up on the spot is beyond me.)
On the mildly more serious side of space opera, I seem to remember hearing that someone is taking on "The Foundation Trilogy".
Or for newer space opera, any of Alistair Reynolds or Peter K Hamilton stuff would work well. I don't think general audiences are ready yet for Iaian Banks or The Culture.
If we want to treat Star Trek technology as something real, I seem to remember once reading that their warp drive involved many layers of shells of subspace, so that no superluminal travel was needed. Each layer was moving fast, but not superluminally with respect to the adjacent layers. The net result of all of those layers was added to be FTL. My impression was that Alcubierre suggested a 2-layer system.
OTOH, if you want to stick with the 2-layer system and are merely upset that it's "unstable", wire up a Conjoiner and ship him/her inside the drive. (Alistair Reynolds reference)
Other relevance... I went to CWRU, where Michelson and Morley did their experiments. Great to have your school's claim to fame being one of the most important failures in history.
Actually, it's not the DRAM itself. It's usually the packaging and that contains the alpha emitters, as you say, in trace amounts. Cosmic rays are becoming more significant, too. They come from "up", and increase with altitude.
Darn. You've both got me beat, and I thought I was doing well still using my 1987 vintage keyboard for my main system at home. I have no idea how old the Type-M I use at work is.
I'd also look at the experiment as a success - just not at what they were trying to prove. We keep hearing about how stressed the world's fisheries are. Seems to me that something else we've done here is a step toward learning how to build better fisheries. The piece of serendipitous knowledge was learning that this type of thing can be done without inedible copepods getting into the middle of the chain. We can go from iron dust to fish.
To be perfectly fair, these problems may not be ffmpeg's fault, but as others have mentioned about cryptic command lines, that may be the real problem here.
MythTV has a companion program, nuvexport, which lets you get stuff out of MythTV and turn it into some other format, such as a DVD. It's really a script that calls other code, such as ffmpeg, under the hood and allows mere command-line mortals to get something done. For regular programming, movies, etc, ffmpeg does a find job. But for exercise videos the motion artifacts almost made my wife sick when she tried to watch them. I ended up using the "transcode" option (and underlying engine) and took the performance hit, but was able to tweak settings to get the motion artifacts under control, and get good exercise DVDs.
I also wouldn't be surprised that this is a function of nuvexport not exposing the full capability of ffmpeg, but then that's a usability issue.
I just barely finished reading "The Atrocity Archives". Later in the book they have an interesting explanation that takes care of the Britcams and DRM all in one fell swoop. To say any more would spoil.
Actually, technical considerations may well have very little to do with it. It's more likely all in the licensing practices and considerations. ARM tends to be very liberally licensed and very well accepted on those terms. Intel tends to be very tight on the licensing, wanting much more to own the world than to work with it. It's possible that Intel will come up with licensable x86 cores, but not very likely, or at least not very likely on decent terms.
The real battle will probably not be Intel vs ARM, but Intel vs ARM + ARM's partners. That's a bit of a different game.
Comedy aside, Jon Steward is a pretty good interviewer, and awfully darned good on the book interviews. He gives the distinct impression that he has actually read and thought about the book under discussion.
But Dr. Who only gets exactly where he pleases when it satisfies the writers. Most of the time it seems that some sort of space-time vortex sucks him off-course, or the Tardis misbehaves, or other such circumstance landing him in the wrong space/time.
I don't seriously propose that. I just like putting on the tinfoil hat every now and then, for the fun of it. You can find fascinating conspiracy theories under pretty much every stone. Perhaps an odd hobby, but then again, isn't voluntarily subjecting yourself to mentally impairing substances that produce long-term brain and body degradation odd, too?
Take the word "female" out of that first sentence. My wife's goddaughter is in her internship to be a pediatrician, and her husband stays at home with the baby, in addition to a little part-time work coaching sports. A high-school friend of mine was a house-husband for a while, simply because his wife had a better job with better benefits.
I strongly agree with the idea of having a stay-at-home parent - my wife stayed at home with our kids. But there's not particular reason other than our society's normal pay structure that it can't be the father instead of the wife doing the primary child-rearing.
Another thought... Do you really want your kids to spend such a large share of their time with the "low cost provider" of childcare? Plus by the time both of you are home from work, you're past your prime for this kind of task, too.
And another thought... In this case putting the spouse back in the workplace means paying for daycare. It also saps money in other ways, such as professional workplace clothing, possibly a second car, taxes, etc. How often do we do a real cost benefit analysis.
Back to taxes for a moment... One could don the tinfoil had and make this two-working-parents thing into a government conspiracy. Not only does it allow them to collect taxes on childrearing, which they don't when a parent stays at home with the kids, they also collect taxes on the other working parent. It's triple-dipping on the family.
Is your data SAFE in a Microsoft format? What other patents do they have that my not have been asserted in this case? Is your company future safe with anything other than pure, fully accepted and vetted open source I.P.? How about your documents, and your ability to manipulate them at will, without encumbrance or fees?
Microsoft isn't the only company that can play the fear game.
Arthur C Clarke wrote a nifty short story that encapsulated some of this. I can't even remember the title, so spoilers are uselss, and I'll just give the gist.
Two astronauts were exploring on the moon, and the wandered into a dust bowl. They got a little dust on their faceplates, and made the mistake of wiping them. The generated static transferred all of the dust to the faceplate, and they were still deep enough in the dust that it attracted more. So even though the dust bowl is shallow enough to simply walk out, they can't see, and so far they haven't found anything they could rub the faceplate with where the static electricity would go the other way, taking the dust off.
Solution:
They rubbed faceplates together. One faceplate takes the charge that takes the dust, the other cleans. Then the astronaut with the clean faceplate can see the way to the buggy, leading the other.
Spiffy - thanks for the reference. It took me a minute to get it, after reading his objections to others' objections, but once you get that's it's quite simple and elegant - presuming you have a compiler you trust. For that matter, I guess your "trusted" compiler could even be inserting a Trojan and you'd still detect problems. That is, as long as it's not the exact same Trojan inserted in exactly the same way.
I'm speaking more to the people who say, "The Constitution does not specifically mention privacy, therefore it is not a right." There were those at the time who feared that the Bill of Rights would in time be taken as an enumeration of rights, and the 9th amendment was part of their attempt to dispell that notion. Unfortunately the pessimists appear to have been proven correct.
You just hack it into the executable. There may well be source for the trapdoor, but it isn't integrated with the compiler source - it's separate. The first time you build the bootstrap compiler, the trapdoor isn't there - you add it to the executable with a separate step, both the code of the trapdoor, the code to add the trapdoor to resulting code, and a hook to the existing compiler to call the trapdoor. Then you use that compiler to compile itself, and the output will include the trapdoor, "natively inserted." At that point, someone could use the bootstrap compiler to compile its own source compare their output to the executable you gave them, and all would look well.
There is of course the well-known article about a bootstrap compiler with a non-source-visible built-in trapdoor that inserts that same trapdoor when it compiles its own source code. These are times when it's nice to know that there are sofware paranoids like Richard Stallman around. At least for the moment, I trust him and his ilk to deliver a bootstrap compiler to me that doesn't have a hidden trapdoor. I might not trust him to handle my social calendar or financial affairs, but my compiler, bootloader, etc, yes.
It's really hard to go through life without trusting someone. I feel much safer trusting people like the FSF, Linux, and OSS communities to develop and deliver my software than I do commercial software suppliers, Microsoft the example in this topic.
Outside perception - it started even before you say but really rooted in your reason #1.
From what I could see IA64 wasn't really started for reasons of pushing technical performance, the problem being solved was the existence of clone designs. All of the IA64 IP was held by a third company, and then licensed back to Intel and HP. That way, none of the IP would be covered by existing Intel or HP cross-licensing agreements. Then the architecture had to be sufficiently different that it would be fully covered by that IP, and none of the essentials covered by anything else.
So the initial design point was driven by legal and marketing concerns, and technical considerations were a distant third place, if that high.
That's the impression from one well versed in chip design who watched from outside.
The key word in your sentence is "YOU DECIDE". The way we're going, you have no decision whatsoever, other than to take your money and walk somewhere else. The way we're going, your ISP decides, and that decision is based on mutual corporate backscratching clubs. Plus if you take your money and walk, it will be to another ISP, who more likely than not is simply a member of a different mutual corporate backscratching club. You'll get to choose content from friends of ISP-A or content from friends of ISP-B.
The reality SHOULD be expressed simply in 2 words - COMMON CARRIER.
Imagine for a moment if your phone company would let you call someone in New York City for free or cheap, but you have to pay a LOT to call someone in Portland, Oregon. Logical if you lived close to New York City, but outrageous if you lived in say, Corvallis, Oregon. THAT's what we're talking about.
Perhaps the companies need to resurrect an old office from medieval times - the Jester. The Jester was the only person in the kingdom (with the possible exception of the Queen, when in private) who could point out the foolishness of the King, and laugh at him.
I was once on a re-engineering team, and found an interesting reference. Some company has an explicit program for keeping them out of the pages of Dilbert. They figured that whatever would get them into Dilbert is most likely stupid, perhaps not easily seen from within, but still merits examination.
Slashdot Mirror
Against both authors, decades/centuries of science fiction have innured us to the basic fact - space travel is HARD. It may very well be that interstellar travel is impossible, as long as we inhabit biological bodies.
Personally, I don't ever think there will ever be any such sort of interstellar war as any of these books. Space is just too big, and it's too expensive to get from one place to another. For that matter, there may well never be any sort of interstellar trade, simply because the transport cost would outweigh just about any cost of goods. So with this in mind, if I really wanted to fight an interstellar war, I'd start with stealthy nanotech in the target's Oort cloud, Kuiper belt or whatever equivalent. The real war would be fought with something more like grey goo, comet and asteroid impacts, or some truly frightening advanced quantum mechanics. ("Anvil of Stars" by Greg Bear)
My other feeling is that we'll either become more peaceful, or we'll never make it to the stars. We don't have a starfaring society, heck we don't even have an interplanetary society, scratch all of that, we barely make it into Earth orbit, with a few small forays beyond. Today's space vehicles are essentially giant well-controlled bombs. Anything in orbit or higher has an incredible amount of potential and/or kinetic energy, and could be considered a weapon if "used properly." We've barely managed to keep from destroying ourselves with the energies we've got at our disposal now. To become a truly interplanetary civilization we need common use of energies somewhere in the realm of 2 orders of magnitude greater. We fuss over nuclear, chemical, and biological materials becoming "terrorist weapons" today. Imagine when we have hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people beyond Earth orbit, not just a fewer than a dozen, and each one has enough potential and/or kinetic energy to be a "weapon of mass destruction."
There's simply no way to keep the cat in the bag. We'll either cure ourselves of most of our violence by the time we're interplanetary, or we won't survive to get there. Oh yeah, I can't see how interstellar travel could be less than at least one order of magnitude beyond that, in energetic terms, perhaps unless we up/download and travel in nonbiological form.
But it is also kind of interesting to look at the ways science fiction authors have used space travel - and war - to explore their own life experiences. As began this thread, "Starship Troopers" was rooted in WWII and "Forever War" was rooted in Viet Nam, and it shows. Another interesting point is how forward-looking Heinlein's technology was, that the superficial trappings of the 2 books were so similar - roughly equivalent spaceships, exoskeletons, etc. Then take a look at Asimov's Foundation novels, original trilogy vs later, and see how 40 years of Earthly progress were mirrored in 500 years of Foundation/Empire progress.
Once I saw that "Starship Troopers" wasn't going to be done in the John Wayne style that would have suited Heinlein well, I began to wish they hadn't done it at all. If you're not going to play it straight, and I'll admit that "Starship Troopers" done straight probably wouldn't sail past the mid 1960's, don't do it. If you want the theme, but want to twist it into modern themes, then do Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War" instead. Where "Starship Troopers" is interstellar war ala WWII, "The Forever War" is interstellar war ala Vietnam, but both are basics of interstellar war, just that the latter is more advanced, as well as more bitter.
And if you just want farce, then Harry Harrison's "Bill, the Galactic Hero" manages to skewer "Starship Troopers", "The Foundation Trilogy", and any number of other stories inhabiting that range, all in the same book.
Oh heck, if you want space opera, it would be great to see something - anything by E.E. Doc Smith turned into a movie. In order to not be downright ludicrous, it would need to be done with tongue heavily in cheek, like "Big Trouble in Little China". (How anyone could say some of those lines, keep it straight, and not crack up on the spot is beyond me.)
On the mildly more serious side of space opera, I seem to remember hearing that someone is taking on "The Foundation Trilogy".
Or for newer space opera, any of Alistair Reynolds or Peter K Hamilton stuff would work well. I don't think general audiences are ready yet for Iaian Banks or The Culture.
If we want to treat Star Trek technology as something real, I seem to remember once reading that their warp drive involved many layers of shells of subspace, so that no superluminal travel was needed. Each layer was moving fast, but not superluminally with respect to the adjacent layers. The net result of all of those layers was added to be FTL. My impression was that Alcubierre suggested a 2-layer system.
OTOH, if you want to stick with the 2-layer system and are merely upset that it's "unstable", wire up a Conjoiner and ship him/her inside the drive. (Alistair Reynolds reference)
Other relevance... I went to CWRU, where Michelson and Morley did their experiments. Great to have your school's claim to fame being one of the most important failures in history.
You get the prize.
Actually, it's not the DRAM itself. It's usually the packaging and that contains the alpha emitters, as you say, in trace amounts. Cosmic rays are becoming more significant, too. They come from "up", and increase with altitude.
Darn. You've both got me beat, and I thought I was doing well still using my 1987 vintage keyboard for my main system at home. I have no idea how old the Type-M I use at work is.
I'd also look at the experiment as a success - just not at what they were trying to prove. We keep hearing about how stressed the world's fisheries are. Seems to me that something else we've done here is a step toward learning how to build better fisheries. The piece of serendipitous knowledge was learning that this type of thing can be done without inedible copepods getting into the middle of the chain. We can go from iron dust to fish.
To be perfectly fair, these problems may not be ffmpeg's fault, but as others have mentioned about cryptic command lines, that may be the real problem here.
MythTV has a companion program, nuvexport, which lets you get stuff out of MythTV and turn it into some other format, such as a DVD. It's really a script that calls other code, such as ffmpeg, under the hood and allows mere command-line mortals to get something done. For regular programming, movies, etc, ffmpeg does a find job. But for exercise videos the motion artifacts almost made my wife sick when she tried to watch them. I ended up using the "transcode" option (and underlying engine) and took the performance hit, but was able to tweak settings to get the motion artifacts under control, and get good exercise DVDs.
I also wouldn't be surprised that this is a function of nuvexport not exposing the full capability of ffmpeg, but then that's a usability issue.
I just barely finished reading "The Atrocity Archives". Later in the book they have an interesting explanation that takes care of the Britcams and DRM all in one fell swoop. To say any more would spoil.
Actually, technical considerations may well have very little to do with it. It's more likely all in the licensing practices and considerations. ARM tends to be very liberally licensed and very well accepted on those terms. Intel tends to be very tight on the licensing, wanting much more to own the world than to work with it. It's possible that Intel will come up with licensable x86 cores, but not very likely, or at least not very likely on decent terms.
The real battle will probably not be Intel vs ARM, but Intel vs ARM + ARM's partners. That's a bit of a different game.
Comedy aside, Jon Steward is a pretty good interviewer, and awfully darned good on the book interviews. He gives the distinct impression that he has actually read and thought about the book under discussion.
I favor "Clarke", if we're going to name it after someone.
But Dr. Who only gets exactly where he pleases when it satisfies the writers. Most of the time it seems that some sort of space-time vortex sucks him off-course, or the Tardis misbehaves, or other such circumstance landing him in the wrong space/time.
I don't seriously propose that. I just like putting on the tinfoil hat every now and then, for the fun of it. You can find fascinating conspiracy theories under pretty much every stone. Perhaps an odd hobby, but then again, isn't voluntarily subjecting yourself to mentally impairing substances that produce long-term brain and body degradation odd, too?
Take the word "female" out of that first sentence. My wife's goddaughter is in her internship to be a pediatrician, and her husband stays at home with the baby, in addition to a little part-time work coaching sports. A high-school friend of mine was a house-husband for a while, simply because his wife had a better job with better benefits.
I strongly agree with the idea of having a stay-at-home parent - my wife stayed at home with our kids. But there's not particular reason other than our society's normal pay structure that it can't be the father instead of the wife doing the primary child-rearing.
Another thought... Do you really want your kids to spend such a large share of their time with the "low cost provider" of childcare? Plus by the time both of you are home from work, you're past your prime for this kind of task, too.
And another thought... In this case putting the spouse back in the workplace means paying for daycare. It also saps money in other ways, such as professional workplace clothing, possibly a second car, taxes, etc. How often do we do a real cost benefit analysis.
Back to taxes for a moment... One could don the tinfoil had and make this two-working-parents thing into a government conspiracy. Not only does it allow them to collect taxes on childrearing, which they don't when a parent stays at home with the kids, they also collect taxes on the other working parent. It's triple-dipping on the family.
Look at it this way...
Is your data SAFE in a Microsoft format?
What other patents do they have that my not have been asserted in this case?
Is your company future safe with anything other than pure, fully accepted and vetted open source I.P.?
How about your documents, and your ability to manipulate them at will, without encumbrance or fees?
Microsoft isn't the only company that can play the fear game.
My wife takes care of the social calendar, my financial affairs are on the computer, but not managed by Stallman.
Arthur C Clarke wrote a nifty short story that encapsulated some of this. I can't even remember the title, so spoilers are uselss, and I'll just give the gist.
Two astronauts were exploring on the moon, and the wandered into a dust bowl. They got a little dust on their faceplates, and made the mistake of wiping them. The generated static transferred all of the dust to the faceplate, and they were still deep enough in the dust that it attracted more. So even though the dust bowl is shallow enough to simply walk out, they can't see, and so far they haven't found anything they could rub the faceplate with where the static electricity would go the other way, taking the dust off.
Solution:
They rubbed faceplates together. One faceplate takes the charge that takes the dust, the other cleans. Then the astronaut with the clean faceplate can see the way to the buggy, leading the other.
Spiffy - thanks for the reference. It took me a minute to get it, after reading his objections to others' objections, but once you get that's it's quite simple and elegant - presuming you have a compiler you trust. For that matter, I guess your "trusted" compiler could even be inserting a Trojan and you'd still detect problems. That is, as long as it's not the exact same Trojan inserted in exactly the same way.
I'm speaking more to the people who say, "The Constitution does not specifically mention privacy, therefore it is not a right." There were those at the time who feared that the Bill of Rights would in time be taken as an enumeration of rights, and the 9th amendment was part of their attempt to dispell that notion. Unfortunately the pessimists appear to have been proven correct.
You just hack it into the executable. There may well be source for the trapdoor, but it isn't integrated with the compiler source - it's separate. The first time you build the bootstrap compiler, the trapdoor isn't there - you add it to the executable with a separate step, both the code of the trapdoor, the code to add the trapdoor to resulting code, and a hook to the existing compiler to call the trapdoor. Then you use that compiler to compile itself, and the output will include the trapdoor, "natively inserted." At that point, someone could use the bootstrap compiler to compile its own source compare their output to the executable you gave them, and all would look well.
There is of course the well-known article about a bootstrap compiler with a non-source-visible built-in trapdoor that inserts that same trapdoor when it compiles its own source code. These are times when it's nice to know that there are sofware paranoids like Richard Stallman around. At least for the moment, I trust him and his ilk to deliver a bootstrap compiler to me that doesn't have a hidden trapdoor. I might not trust him to handle my social calendar or financial affairs, but my compiler, bootloader, etc, yes.
It's really hard to go through life without trusting someone. I feel much safer trusting people like the FSF, Linux, and OSS communities to develop and deliver my software than I do commercial software suppliers, Microsoft the example in this topic.
Outside perception - it started even before you say but really rooted in your reason #1.
From what I could see IA64 wasn't really started for reasons of pushing technical performance, the problem being solved was the existence of clone designs. All of the IA64 IP was held by a third company, and then licensed back to Intel and HP. That way, none of the IP would be covered by existing Intel or HP cross-licensing agreements. Then the architecture had to be sufficiently different that it would be fully covered by that IP, and none of the essentials covered by anything else.
So the initial design point was driven by legal and marketing concerns, and technical considerations were a distant third place, if that high.
That's the impression from one well versed in chip design who watched from outside.
The key word in your sentence is "YOU DECIDE". The way we're going, you have no decision whatsoever, other than to take your money and walk somewhere else. The way we're going, your ISP decides, and that decision is based on mutual corporate backscratching clubs. Plus if you take your money and walk, it will be to another ISP, who more likely than not is simply a member of a different mutual corporate backscratching club. You'll get to choose content from friends of ISP-A or content from friends of ISP-B.
The reality SHOULD be expressed simply in 2 words - COMMON CARRIER.
Imagine for a moment if your phone company would let you call someone in New York City for free or cheap, but you have to pay a LOT to call someone in Portland, Oregon. Logical if you lived close to New York City, but outrageous if you lived in say, Corvallis, Oregon. THAT's what we're talking about.
Perhaps the companies need to resurrect an old office from medieval times - the Jester. The Jester was the only person in the kingdom (with the possible exception of the Queen, when in private) who could point out the foolishness of the King, and laugh at him.
I was once on a re-engineering team, and found an interesting reference. Some company has an explicit program for keeping them out of the pages of Dilbert. They figured that whatever would get them into Dilbert is most likely stupid, perhaps not easily seen from within, but still merits examination.