No, Greg Bear's idea from Moving Mars was not the same as the idea as McCarthy is talking about. In Bear's work, the concept was that all atoms had certain variables that described them and that those variables (including location relative to the rest of the universe) could be altered.
If you'd take the time to read the article, what McCarthy is writing about is a quantum dot -- a atom-sized well that can have particles pumped into it, specifically, electrons. Drop in three electrons, and they'll take up an orbit around the empty center of the quantum dot, and you have a dot that behaves with the properties of lithium.
For a better explanation, sit down and read his first novel on the subject, The Collapsium...it stands on its own quite nicely. You may opt to skip The Wellstone, which isn't as good a book, and would probably need to be propped up by the first.
...but as much as I'd like to believe this, I have a hard time believing that any of those apps have already been ported to 64-bit. I mean, my God, Apple already had the developers jump through hoops to port to OS X...now they want 64-bit apps two years later? Right.
Well, I bought 3 tracks on the first day, and after looking at my budget numbers, I can afford to buy 5-10 more tonight, which I probably will. There's some great blues on there (old B.B. King and some newer Alvin Youngblood Hart) that I'm thinking would be great additions to my playlist.
Thus far, I'm really happy with the service, and can see myself spending $30-40 a month in it. And as for quality, the AACs Apple's offering sound a lot better than comparable bit-rate MP3s.
Maybe they've convinced themselves that there's more money for them to make by suing for intellectual property infringement than by actually making new stuff.
Bullshit. Just because taxes are increasing with population doesn't mean that there's going to be equal amounts of money available to do the same things you did before. Modifying existing infrastructure is more expensive than building new. And existing infrastructure needs to be repaired/cared-for. So let's not jump to the conclusion that there's a static relationship between tax revenues and the amount that they can purchase.
Can you present some data to back up your "not yet convinced" statement?
Going to space is old-hat and can be made cheap if we can get around a lot of the b.s. bueauracracy that makes government-run space agencies cost what they do. All basic technology goes down in cost once it's gotten widespread adoption -- this is why technology (esp. computer technology) has been moving so quickly in the last twenty years. Because corporations need to continue to make profits they need to keep making new-and-improved technology. The stuff that was horribly expensive when we kicked off manned spaceflight costs pennies now. Honestly, if we replicated the Apollo program using the same technologies, the program would cost PEANUTS. Think about it -- the computer that powered the CM and LEM is dwarfed by stuff as simple as a Palm III. All the exotic alloys they had to spend years researching and experimenting with are now old-hat. We have a great, reliable engine that we can use NOW (the Space Shuttle Main Engine), and another one that was extremely promising before the program was killed (the Aerospike, part of the X-33/VentureStar program). Going back to the moon would be a walk in the park (financially and technologically, but maybe not politically) right now.
As for orbit, well, humanity's already had some good experience with Mir and Skylab, and we're learning from our attempts at the International Space Station. Russia and France have both built extremely reliable, inexpensive throwaway boosters that work like a champ.
Sounds vaguely like what I suspect will happen here in Minnesota with other stuff. Right now, we have a pretty large ($4 billion) deficit, and a lot of programs are getting cut. Roads are a problem here because of the huge amounts of population growth we've had in the last 20 years... Right now, our state legislature is talking about allowing private companies to add additional lanes to existing roads and then charge money to use those lanes so that they can recoup the cost of building them, plus make a "reasonable profit", after which time, the cost of using those lanes would be reduced. I heard about this on the news last night, and the first thing I thought of was the telecomms and all the extra bullshit they tack onto our bills.
You and I both know that the cost of using those lanes would NEVER go down. They'll always find a way to charge more for what they've built, simply because people become so adjusted to things (like telephones) that they become a "necessity" instead of a "luxury" and people pay them blindly for the service. Look at cable TV -- how many of the channels you get in your huge bundle do you actually watch?
Whee. I can click and vote faster than ever for a candidate who doesn't really do much except cut taxes for the rich and lead my country into an unjustified war.
Although, if you think about it, it could do away with exit polls and replace them with a realtime counter, so we could get our entire fill of the evening's bullshit estimates and posturing crammed into a bite-sized easy-to-digest Fox-style reality-TV one-hour block.
One of the things I love is how people always just assume that a GM line of humans is going to band together and conquer the world. People are people, regardless of their genes -- sure, if homo superior comes along, some of them will advocate wiping out all us homo sapiens, but like any emotional/political issue, there will be at least one other side to it -- the group that believes in peaceful co-existence.
Of course, their belief structures are going to be influenced by how we treat them, so maybe it would be best for us to just be nice and stop being dickheads.
Of course, how can you tell for certain that a human is GM'ed? You can't. If I were to go out and get gene therapy that gave me Lance Armstrong's lactate threshhold, VO2 Max, etc., no one would be able to tell the difference, because those genes already exist in the human baseline.
This is a lot of hand-wringing and pointless worrying. Yes, the applecart is going to be upset, but in the end, life will keep going the way it's been going for the last 2000 years. Nothing much changes except lines on the map and the faces of the people in power.
Then why are you bothering to read this, much less comment on it? Boo-fucking-hoo. You won't buy OSX until it runs in a poorly-designed beige shitbox that you can hack to hell and gone. And when OSX starts to bloat up so that it can support all the cheap two-bit (not file size) junk that floats around in the PC world, you can bitch about the "old days" when OSX was a tight, well-constructed OS instead of a pile of kludges like Windows.
No OSX for you? Darn. I'd hate to see a narrow-minded troll running my favorite OS.
Usually, they have it in a contract. For example, bicycle shops (I've worked in them 3 of the past 4 years) often have a contractual clause with the manufacturer/distributor (not always the same company) prohibiting them from selling the bikes on the Internet. For bikes, the reasons are obvious -- 1.) they come unassembled and require someone that actually knows what they're doing to put them together, and 2.) bike fit is extremely important (there's more to it than standover height, but that's an explanation for another time).
Why Games Workshit, er, Workshop, is doing this is beyond me -- it's downright stupid, because more channels = more sales.
I guess I can see the point, though...in retail most items are marked up XX% over wholesale prices, and wholesale price is a YY% mark-up over the manufacturing costs. GW probably figures that for Internet sales, they can just mark their product up to retail cost for consumers and get XX% + YY%.
Incidentally, it's not illegal to fix prices on an item if it's in the initial contract written between the company and the retailer -- Oakley has done it for 20 years. You can't sell Oakley products above or below a certain price...if you're caught, the contract is voided and you won't be selling Oakley stuff anytime in the near future.
This is just GW being a bunch of tight-fisted buttheads. I'm sure the gaming industry has probably been shrinking for the past ten years, thanks to the huge increase in video game sales, and certain publishers are probably looking for any methodology they can to increase revenues...
This sounds like a Field of Dreams mentality, the same mentality that plagued countless dot-com startups -- if you build it, they will come. Yeah. I used to live not far from Wilkes-Barre, and commute through it on my way to my dot-com job down in Philly. The place is, by no means, a gem on the map that is Pennsylvania. Furthermore, the place may have scorching fast bandwidth by the time the project is done, but it doesn't have the social or economic infrastructure to support the companies they're trying to attract to the area -- ie.: no mall, no Starbucks, no CompUSA or Fry's or whatever, no IKEA, etc. The best these guys can hope for is a few datacenters in their town staffed by a few dozen people, because no one in their right mind is going to establish a whole new business or move themselves and their families to a podunk little scumhole of a town just because it has large bandwidth...
If you aren't informed enough to know the ins-and-outs of a subject, perhaps it's bad to make broad generalizations? Yeah, FUD may have been out of line in this case, but generally speaking, shooting holes in it is an event in the Slashdot Olympics...
It seems to me that your only measure of hardware is in raw speed. My argument is more that you get more in overall "experience"...it's similar to a BMW... why do they cost so damn much compared to cars with similar styling (sedans), horsepower, and engines? Because of the thoughtfulness that goes into their engineering... I don't buy Macs just for horsepower, but for the attention to detail, which I think applies to most of the people who do purchase them...
Again, more FUD. A Mac will run multiple OS's -- MacOS 9 and earlier, Mac OS X, Yellow Dog Linux, and Linux/PPC (though I don't know if that one is still being distributed)...
As for cheap hardware, you get what you pay for...
Anyone else notice that the row of pictures at the bottom of the page, the old Linux versions of VirtualPC seem to have gone missing with Version 6? Hmmm, and Microsoft bought VPC from Connectix, you say? Hmmm. Imagine my surprise.
Balancing the ecosystem may not even be necessary. Emergent complexity and mutations (plenty of UV gets through to the surface of Mars due to minimal/non-existent ozone in the atmosphere) should suffice. Initially, all we should need to do is introduce an initial group of species, and let them fill in the gaps.
As Crichton so elegantly put it, "Life finds a way."
I think the real issue at hand is not whether we can terraform Mars, but how we will.
In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, this very item was debated and you could tell that the author had done his homework -- the two options are the cold-thin-quickly-breathable route, or the thick-CO2 route, using plant life to convert the atmosphere to breathability over a 10,000 year period.
As a colonist, I'd prefer the route to breathability much more than the thick vegetation. But common sense tells me that the planet would be more sustainable and robust if it went CO2 first and a large amount of surface life was allowed to grow...
The only act of terror I see here is the MPAA and Microsoft shooting themselves in their respect feet.
I mean, come on, this is taking it a bit far. Gasoline purchases, maybe a bit, yeah, but most of that money goes to propping up the regimes that keep the more fundamentalist/psychotic of the locals firmly in check. Heroin purchases, prior to our ass-whupping of Afghanistan, okay, I can see that...
But pirated software? Give me a fucking break. I'm willing to bet that most of the people that sell illegal copies of the stuff are just out to improve their standard of living...
You'd swear Apple was a dinosaur, too -- they've been declared "extinct" on a monthly basis since the early 1990's. Something weird about Asteroid Gates or something like that... I'd still love to be Apple, though.
The paper-ballot voting booth -- worked just fine for over 200 years...and then, one major screw-up in one state and everything goes to shit. Go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Greg Bear's idea from Moving Mars was not the same as the idea as McCarthy is talking about. In Bear's work, the concept was that all atoms had certain variables that described them and that those variables (including location relative to the rest of the universe) could be altered.
If you'd take the time to read the article, what McCarthy is writing about is a quantum dot -- a atom-sized well that can have particles pumped into it, specifically, electrons. Drop in three electrons, and they'll take up an orbit around the empty center of the quantum dot, and you have a dot that behaves with the properties of lithium.
For a better explanation, sit down and read his first novel on the subject, The Collapsium...it stands on its own quite nicely. You may opt to skip The Wellstone, which isn't as good a book, and would probably need to be propped up by the first.
...but as much as I'd like to believe this, I have a hard time believing that any of those apps have already been ported to 64-bit. I mean, my God, Apple already had the developers jump through hoops to port to OS X...now they want 64-bit apps two years later? Right.
Well, I bought 3 tracks on the first day, and after looking at my budget numbers, I can afford to buy 5-10 more tonight, which I probably will. There's some great blues on there (old B.B. King and some newer Alvin Youngblood Hart) that I'm thinking would be great additions to my playlist.
Thus far, I'm really happy with the service, and can see myself spending $30-40 a month in it. And as for quality, the AACs Apple's offering sound a lot better than comparable bit-rate MP3s.
Maybe they've convinced themselves that there's more money for them to make by suing for intellectual property infringement than by actually making new stuff.
Bullshit. Just because taxes are increasing with population doesn't mean that there's going to be equal amounts of money available to do the same things you did before. Modifying existing infrastructure is more expensive than building new. And existing infrastructure needs to be repaired/cared-for. So let's not jump to the conclusion that there's a static relationship between tax revenues and the amount that they can purchase.
Can you present some data to back up your "not yet convinced" statement?
Going to space is old-hat and can be made cheap if we can get around a lot of the b.s. bueauracracy that makes government-run space agencies cost what they do. All basic technology goes down in cost once it's gotten widespread adoption -- this is why technology (esp. computer technology) has been moving so quickly in the last twenty years. Because corporations need to continue to make profits they need to keep making new-and-improved technology. The stuff that was horribly expensive when we kicked off manned spaceflight costs pennies now. Honestly, if we replicated the Apollo program using the same technologies, the program would cost PEANUTS. Think about it -- the computer that powered the CM and LEM is dwarfed by stuff as simple as a Palm III. All the exotic alloys they had to spend years researching and experimenting with are now old-hat. We have a great, reliable engine that we can use NOW (the Space Shuttle Main Engine), and another one that was extremely promising before the program was killed (the Aerospike, part of the X-33/VentureStar program). Going back to the moon would be a walk in the park (financially and technologically, but maybe not politically) right now.
As for orbit, well, humanity's already had some good experience with Mir and Skylab, and we're learning from our attempts at the International Space Station. Russia and France have both built extremely reliable, inexpensive throwaway boosters that work like a champ.
Sounds vaguely like what I suspect will happen here in Minnesota with other stuff. Right now, we have a pretty large ($4 billion) deficit, and a lot of programs are getting cut. Roads are a problem here because of the huge amounts of population growth we've had in the last 20 years... Right now, our state legislature is talking about allowing private companies to add additional lanes to existing roads and then charge money to use those lanes so that they can recoup the cost of building them, plus make a "reasonable profit", after which time, the cost of using those lanes would be reduced. I heard about this on the news last night, and the first thing I thought of was the telecomms and all the extra bullshit they tack onto our bills.
You and I both know that the cost of using those lanes would NEVER go down. They'll always find a way to charge more for what they've built, simply because people become so adjusted to things (like telephones) that they become a "necessity" instead of a "luxury" and people pay them blindly for the service. Look at cable TV -- how many of the channels you get in your huge bundle do you actually watch?
One of the things I love is how people always just assume that a GM line of humans is going to band together and conquer the world. People are people, regardless of their genes -- sure, if homo superior comes along, some of them will advocate wiping out all us homo sapiens, but like any emotional/political issue, there will be at least one other side to it -- the group that believes in peaceful co-existence.
Of course, their belief structures are going to be influenced by how we treat them, so maybe it would be best for us to just be nice and stop being dickheads.
Of course, how can you tell for certain that a human is GM'ed? You can't. If I were to go out and get gene therapy that gave me Lance Armstrong's lactate threshhold, VO2 Max, etc., no one would be able to tell the difference, because those genes already exist in the human baseline.
This is a lot of hand-wringing and pointless worrying. Yes, the applecart is going to be upset, but in the end, life will keep going the way it's been going for the last 2000 years. Nothing much changes except lines on the map and the faces of the people in power.
Anyone want to take bets as to when the DoS attacks begin? Secondary action: how long after the DoS ends does the site end up being 0wnz0r3d?
:-)
Of course, for once, we'll see the Slashdot Effect put to good use.
Then why are you bothering to read this, much less comment on it? Boo-fucking-hoo. You won't buy OSX until it runs in a poorly-designed beige shitbox that you can hack to hell and gone. And when OSX starts to bloat up so that it can support all the cheap two-bit (not file size) junk that floats around in the PC world, you can bitch about the "old days" when OSX was a tight, well-constructed OS instead of a pile of kludges like Windows.
No OSX for you? Darn. I'd hate to see a narrow-minded troll running my favorite OS.
I want one that also tracks hungry, angry bears and emits a loud noise when it senses their proximity.
Nothing like attracting their attention, right?
Usually, they have it in a contract. For example, bicycle shops (I've worked in them 3 of the past 4 years) often have a contractual clause with the manufacturer/distributor (not always the same company) prohibiting them from selling the bikes on the Internet. For bikes, the reasons are obvious -- 1.) they come unassembled and require someone that actually knows what they're doing to put them together, and 2.) bike fit is extremely important (there's more to it than standover height, but that's an explanation for another time).
Why Games Workshit, er, Workshop, is doing this is beyond me -- it's downright stupid, because more channels = more sales.
I guess I can see the point, though...in retail most items are marked up XX% over wholesale prices, and wholesale price is a YY% mark-up over the manufacturing costs. GW probably figures that for Internet sales, they can just mark their product up to retail cost for consumers and get XX% + YY%.
Incidentally, it's not illegal to fix prices on an item if it's in the initial contract written between the company and the retailer -- Oakley has done it for 20 years. You can't sell Oakley products above or below a certain price...if you're caught, the contract is voided and you won't be selling Oakley stuff anytime in the near future.
This is just GW being a bunch of tight-fisted buttheads. I'm sure the gaming industry has probably been shrinking for the past ten years, thanks to the huge increase in video game sales, and certain publishers are probably looking for any methodology they can to increase revenues...
This sounds like a Field of Dreams mentality, the same mentality that plagued countless dot-com startups -- if you build it, they will come. Yeah. I used to live not far from Wilkes-Barre, and commute through it on my way to my dot-com job down in Philly. The place is, by no means, a gem on the map that is Pennsylvania. Furthermore, the place may have scorching fast bandwidth by the time the project is done, but it doesn't have the social or economic infrastructure to support the companies they're trying to attract to the area -- ie.: no mall, no Starbucks, no CompUSA or Fry's or whatever, no IKEA, etc. The best these guys can hope for is a few datacenters in their town staffed by a few dozen people, because no one in their right mind is going to establish a whole new business or move themselves and their families to a podunk little scumhole of a town just because it has large bandwidth...
Yeah, or that new "minuted" measurement they're using for the Dell. What gives with that?
If you aren't informed enough to know the ins-and-outs of a subject, perhaps it's bad to make broad generalizations? Yeah, FUD may have been out of line in this case, but generally speaking, shooting holes in it is an event in the Slashdot Olympics...
It seems to me that your only measure of hardware is in raw speed. My argument is more that you get more in overall "experience"...it's similar to a BMW... why do they cost so damn much compared to cars with similar styling (sedans), horsepower, and engines? Because of the thoughtfulness that goes into their engineering... I don't buy Macs just for horsepower, but for the attention to detail, which I think applies to most of the people who do purchase them...
Again, more FUD. A Mac will run multiple OS's -- MacOS 9 and earlier, Mac OS X, Yellow Dog Linux, and Linux/PPC (though I don't know if that one is still being distributed)...
As for cheap hardware, you get what you pay for...
From the "Better Off Dead" School of Programming:
function Drive();
{
go.reallyfast;
if something.inyourway {
turn;
}
}
"...Two thirds of Apple's core market is made up of the very young and the very old..."
:-)
So the other third is made up of the people who are between young and old? Is that it?
Anyone else notice that the row of pictures at the bottom of the page, the old Linux versions of VirtualPC seem to have gone missing with Version 6? Hmmm, and Microsoft bought VPC from Connectix, you say? Hmmm. Imagine my surprise.
Balancing the ecosystem may not even be necessary. Emergent complexity and mutations (plenty of UV gets through to the surface of Mars due to minimal/non-existent ozone in the atmosphere) should suffice. Initially, all we should need to do is introduce an initial group of species, and let them fill in the gaps.
As Crichton so elegantly put it, "Life finds a way."
I think the real issue at hand is not whether we can terraform Mars, but how we will.
In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, this very item was debated and you could tell that the author had done his homework -- the two options are the cold-thin-quickly-breathable route, or the thick-CO2 route, using plant life to convert the atmosphere to breathability over a 10,000 year period.
As a colonist, I'd prefer the route to breathability much more than the thick vegetation. But common sense tells me that the planet would be more sustainable and robust if it went CO2 first and a large amount of surface life was allowed to grow...
The only act of terror I see here is the MPAA and Microsoft shooting themselves in their respect feet.
I mean, come on, this is taking it a bit far. Gasoline purchases, maybe a bit, yeah, but most of that money goes to propping up the regimes that keep the more fundamentalist/psychotic of the locals firmly in check. Heroin purchases, prior to our ass-whupping of Afghanistan, okay, I can see that...
But pirated software? Give me a fucking break. I'm willing to bet that most of the people that sell illegal copies of the stuff are just out to improve their standard of living...
You'd swear Apple was a dinosaur, too -- they've been declared "extinct" on a monthly basis since the early 1990's. Something weird about Asteroid Gates or something like that... I'd still love to be Apple, though.
The paper-ballot voting booth -- worked just fine for over 200 years...and then, one major screw-up in one state and everything goes to shit. Go figure.
Four. I've been running since 10.0.1 on my dual-USB iBook, and never had to re-install.