You're right, it isn't so much ownership of a printer that (normal) people want, it's having customized stuff. Until the price of the filament or resin comes down, 3D printers and their output will continue to be relegated to the expensive toy category. $20 per cubic inch is a bit more than most people are willing to pay for small plastic trinkets. If the final cost of production comes within, say, a factor of 2 of the cost of bulk injection molded plastic items, then the age of mass-customization will be upon us. Handy people might buy a printer for use around the house, making replacement doorknobs and coathooks, but the average consumer will be more interested in uploading a series of photographs from different angles and receiving a 3D print of their favorite person or thing from the CostCo 3D photo-printing service.
Japan's NTT just sent a petabit per second over fiber. How can mere mortals hope to cope, having a measly 400 Gbps? We should be talking tens of terabits, at least.
I bet a nickle they used social engineering to infiltrate. Probably had someone buy a bunch of product from several dealers, to establish a rep. Then seduced the operators by claiming to be doing an article/film/book for some big-name outlet and could they pretty please just discreetly meet for an interview? The operators would be reassured by the purchase history of the agent, and if the agent spun a pretty yarn that boosted the egos of the operators enough, it'd probably be no big deal to get them to come out of their protective shell.
The panspermia hypothesis doesn't take into account the inherent instability of DNA or the extremely hostile nature of space. The only way life stays alive is by constantly repairing itself. That requires a living ecology, with food, water and all the other good things that life needs. Ejecta thrown out into space won't have those good things for long. So that requires that all the DNA-bearing particles be dormant, like bacterial spores. Thing is, near a lethal-radiation source like our sun, DNA doesn't stand a chance. After a few weeks of normal radiation, enough DNA damage will be done to render these spores unviable. If the sun throws a tantrum, even 5 minutes of exposure can do enough damage to be lethal to living things that are actively trying to repair their DNA. Dormant spores would be reduced to odd molecular fragments that a seasoned xenochemist might say came from life at one time. Panspermia just doesn't hold water in our solar milieu.
PC game graphics are tied lockstep to console limitations. Look at Skyrim. Instead of a huge leap in graphics quality like we saw from Morrowind to Oblivion, we end up with about a 1.25-generation improvement from Oblivion to Skyrim. Why? Because of console hardware capability. And it's not just graphics. Skyrim has exactly the same size of real estate as Oblivion has. Bethesda put in some mountains for you to have to walk around in Skyrim, so it'd seem bigger. How much do you want to bet the world size is dictated by console memory capacity?
So, even if the PS4 sucks rocks, at least games will start to take advantage of a little more of the hardware that PC gamers invest in.
Any activity which stimulates adrenaline release increases aggression. Adrenaline is the fight-or-flight hormone. When I used to play racquetball, it felt exactly the same as playing a first-person shooter, except all the sweat.
Trading in securities and options is mentally challenging and (potentially) profitable. You can spend as much or as little time on it as you like, and when you come across someone who doesn't understand the market, instead of tolerating them and repeating yourself, you can make money from their ignorance. There are brokerages that allow software developers to automate their trading too, such as Interactive Brokers and TradeStation.
Let's look at some numbers, then. Assuming these bots have a relatively low cost of operation, (big if, I know), and they each cost $30K, and you need at least a 100% in three-year return, then you'd have to generate $10K/year of utility. The minimum cost for people is $7.50/hour minimum wage (a grossly under-accurate simplification). Assuming the robots can be kept busy, and assuming their time must be worth $10K/year, their hourly cost becomes 10000 / (365 * 24) or $1.14 / hour. In the video, they don't appear to meed much supervision. At least, just for the task of shuffling pots back and forth between defined areas.
It sounds as though you had a capacity utilization problem. Did your automation sit idle most of the day?
Actually, I plan to be submerged in liquid nitrogen. And, if several decades/centuries of technological development enable my re-animation, I may care. Long shot, sure. But...
Notice the title of their response: "What We HAVE TO SAY About Legalizing Marijuana". This title is practically screaming "we all know this is a total bullshit response, but our political situation dictates that this is what we HAVE TO SAY".
It's one thing to read about what the cartels are doing, and another thing altogether to see it. Prohibition must end, if for no other reason than to end this.
Interestingly, there is precedent that establishes fifth amendment protection against being required to provide an encryption key. The argument was that if using the key turns up anything incriminating, then the defendant would have been required to self-incriminate by providing the key.
Your cognitive dissonance is implicit in your question - "...how does this translate into real life...?". For an increasing number of people, the virtual worlds they spend time in ARE real life. What you think of as real life is for them just a means for supporting their existence in the worlds they prefer to spend their time in. How many Wal-Mart stockers only work to support their WoW addiction? If given a chance to ditch their real world job and become gainfully employed within the virtual world of their choosing, how many would happily do so?
Here, think of it this way: once virtual reality achieves a certain level of believability, some people are able to suspend disbelief in it. As technology improves, virtual worlds will become increasingly believable to the point where perhaps no one with ordinary human senses can tell the difference. At some point, perhaps when you are old and bedridden, you too may welcome the possibility of inhabiting a world in which you are not constrained by your real-world body, and can appear godlike.
Perhaps what bothers you is the niggling sensation that virtual life is slowly encroaching on real life, a trend that, by obvious extension, may ultimately mean that all the time and effort you're putting in on real life won't amount to a hill of virtual beans in the future. After all, who will want to visit you in your shabby little real-world McMansion when everybody else is living their own planet-sized castle?
DNA forms pyrimidine dimers when exposed to energetic photons of UV and higher. The way life keeps living despite the mild exposure to gamma radiation on Earth is through active repair. In space, not only will organisms not have any active metabolism to accomplish repair, cosmic radiation is constant, and the longer a specimen is drifting through space, the more likely it is to be exposed to a heavy burst of X-rays or gamma rays from a solar flare. If a human were out prancing around on the moon when a solar flare erupted, they could receive sufficient radiation to be fatal, despite their active metabolic DNA repair mechanisms. An inert stretch of DNA in space for even one complete 13-year sunspot cycle would be completely unreadable, let alone able to participate in any replication.
I wouldn't say better technology == less work. Rather, better technology == more efficient creation of wealth. An automated factory that cranks out a fleet of cars every day, and only requires one person to push the 'start' or 'stop' button is effectively magnifying the productivity of that one person to a level that now requires thousands of people. That one person can create tens of millions of dollars in wealth per day, in current economic terms. If their pay is proportionate to this level of productivity, then they may personally expect to be able to spend at least ones of millions of dollars per day, in current terms, enabling them to wake every morning to a newly constructed and furnished house, if that's their desire. Such a house might be provided by a subscription to the automated house-constructing service operated by their neighbor.
Of course, pushing the 'start' or 'stop' button is effectively make-work, since it could be automated as well. The rising tide of skill displacement will inevitably force a choice upon us: Either create millions of make-work 'jobs', for which people are paid ridiculous sums for doing essentially nothing, or simply pay everyone a base stipend, simply for living, so that they can continue to purchase things from the automated factories, making the factory owners ever more disproportionately wealthy.
On the other hand, you'd be donating information to researchers who are not as constrained by those pesky regulations regarding human genetic manipulation, so the world would be more likely to see the tangible results of your contribution sooner.
I got burned by purchasing Settlers 7 and was typically able to play less than an hour at a time before getting a "connection lost - you can't play anymore" dialog (on a single-player game on my own PC!). Because of Ubi's insane DRM, I just grabbed a pirate copy of From Dust last night. It's a cool game. Well worth the money, which I would otherwise have happily paid for it.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, it isn't so much ownership of a printer that (normal) people want, it's having customized stuff. Until the price of the filament or resin comes down, 3D printers and their output will continue to be relegated to the expensive toy category. $20 per cubic inch is a bit more than most people are willing to pay for small plastic trinkets. If the final cost of production comes within, say, a factor of 2 of the cost of bulk injection molded plastic items, then the age of mass-customization will be upon us. Handy people might buy a printer for use around the house, making replacement doorknobs and coathooks, but the average consumer will be more interested in uploading a series of photographs from different angles and receiving a 3D print of their favorite person or thing from the CostCo 3D photo-printing service.
Japan's NTT just sent a petabit per second over fiber. How can mere mortals hope to cope, having a measly 400 Gbps? We should be talking tens of terabits, at least.
I bet a nickle they used social engineering to infiltrate. Probably had someone buy a bunch of product from several dealers, to establish a rep. Then seduced the operators by claiming to be doing an article/film/book for some big-name outlet and could they pretty please just discreetly meet for an interview? The operators would be reassured by the purchase history of the agent, and if the agent spun a pretty yarn that boosted the egos of the operators enough, it'd probably be no big deal to get them to come out of their protective shell.
Coconut shells cloppity-clopping. Perhaps with a minstrel singing a ballad recounting the bravery of the driver.
The panspermia hypothesis doesn't take into account the inherent instability of DNA or the extremely hostile nature of space. The only way life stays alive is by constantly repairing itself. That requires a living ecology, with food, water and all the other good things that life needs. Ejecta thrown out into space won't have those good things for long. So that requires that all the DNA-bearing particles be dormant, like bacterial spores. Thing is, near a lethal-radiation source like our sun, DNA doesn't stand a chance. After a few weeks of normal radiation, enough DNA damage will be done to render these spores unviable. If the sun throws a tantrum, even 5 minutes of exposure can do enough damage to be lethal to living things that are actively trying to repair their DNA. Dormant spores would be reduced to odd molecular fragments that a seasoned xenochemist might say came from life at one time. Panspermia just doesn't hold water in our solar milieu.
PC game graphics are tied lockstep to console limitations. Look at Skyrim. Instead of a huge leap in graphics quality like we saw from Morrowind to Oblivion, we end up with about a 1.25-generation improvement from Oblivion to Skyrim. Why? Because of console hardware capability. And it's not just graphics. Skyrim has exactly the same size of real estate as Oblivion has. Bethesda put in some mountains for you to have to walk around in Skyrim, so it'd seem bigger. How much do you want to bet the world size is dictated by console memory capacity?
So, even if the PS4 sucks rocks, at least games will start to take advantage of a little more of the hardware that PC gamers invest in.
I've been dead. It's just like being asleep, only without the dreams.
Any activity which stimulates adrenaline release increases aggression. Adrenaline is the fight-or-flight hormone. When I used to play racquetball, it felt exactly the same as playing a first-person shooter, except all the sweat.
Trading in securities and options is mentally challenging and (potentially) profitable. You can spend as much or as little time on it as you like, and when you come across someone who doesn't understand the market, instead of tolerating them and repeating yourself, you can make money from their ignorance. There are brokerages that allow software developers to automate their trading too, such as Interactive Brokers and TradeStation.
Aubrey deGrey gives a spirited TED talk on the subject.
Let's look at some numbers, then. Assuming these bots have a relatively low cost of operation, (big if, I know), and they each cost $30K, and you need at least a 100% in three-year return, then you'd have to generate $10K/year of utility. The minimum cost for people is $7.50/hour minimum wage (a grossly under-accurate simplification). Assuming the robots can be kept busy, and assuming their time must be worth $10K/year, their hourly cost becomes 10000 / (365 * 24) or $1.14 / hour. In the video, they don't appear to meed much supervision. At least, just for the task of shuffling pots back and forth between defined areas. It sounds as though you had a capacity utilization problem. Did your automation sit idle most of the day?
Actually, I plan to be submerged in liquid nitrogen. And, if several decades/centuries of technological development enable my re-animation, I may care. Long shot, sure. But...
Notice the title of their response: "What We HAVE TO SAY About Legalizing Marijuana". This title is practically screaming "we all know this is a total bullshit response, but our political situation dictates that this is what we HAVE TO SAY".
It's one thing to read about what the cartels are doing, and another thing altogether to see it. Prohibition must end, if for no other reason than to end this.
What's more, TSA is exhibiting mission creep. Since when was interdiction of drugs an anti-terrorist action?
Interestingly, there is precedent that establishes fifth amendment protection against being required to provide an encryption key. The argument was that if using the key turns up anything incriminating, then the defendant would have been required to self-incriminate by providing the key.
According to this profitability calculator with the current difficulty and market value, miners are now making a negative profit.
But if gas casts more, more people will just stay at home where one of the biggest sources of entertainment is making more people.
Your cognitive dissonance is implicit in your question - "...how does this translate into real life...?". For an increasing number of people, the virtual worlds they spend time in ARE real life. What you think of as real life is for them just a means for supporting their existence in the worlds they prefer to spend their time in. How many Wal-Mart stockers only work to support their WoW addiction? If given a chance to ditch their real world job and become gainfully employed within the virtual world of their choosing, how many would happily do so?
Here, think of it this way: once virtual reality achieves a certain level of believability, some people are able to suspend disbelief in it. As technology improves, virtual worlds will become increasingly believable to the point where perhaps no one with ordinary human senses can tell the difference. At some point, perhaps when you are old and bedridden, you too may welcome the possibility of inhabiting a world in which you are not constrained by your real-world body, and can appear godlike.
Perhaps what bothers you is the niggling sensation that virtual life is slowly encroaching on real life, a trend that, by obvious extension, may ultimately mean that all the time and effort you're putting in on real life won't amount to a hill of virtual beans in the future. After all, who will want to visit you in your shabby little real-world McMansion when everybody else is living their own planet-sized castle?
"I believe that every human has a finite amount of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises."
— Neil Armstrong
DNA forms pyrimidine dimers when exposed to energetic photons of UV and higher. The way life keeps living despite the mild exposure to gamma radiation on Earth is through active repair. In space, not only will organisms not have any active metabolism to accomplish repair, cosmic radiation is constant, and the longer a specimen is drifting through space, the more likely it is to be exposed to a heavy burst of X-rays or gamma rays from a solar flare. If a human were out prancing around on the moon when a solar flare erupted, they could receive sufficient radiation to be fatal, despite their active metabolic DNA repair mechanisms. An inert stretch of DNA in space for even one complete 13-year sunspot cycle would be completely unreadable, let alone able to participate in any replication.
I wouldn't say better technology == less work. Rather, better technology == more efficient creation of wealth. An automated factory that cranks out a fleet of cars every day, and only requires one person to push the 'start' or 'stop' button is effectively magnifying the productivity of that one person to a level that now requires thousands of people. That one person can create tens of millions of dollars in wealth per day, in current economic terms. If their pay is proportionate to this level of productivity, then they may personally expect to be able to spend at least ones of millions of dollars per day, in current terms, enabling them to wake every morning to a newly constructed and furnished house, if that's their desire. Such a house might be provided by a subscription to the automated house-constructing service operated by their neighbor.
Of course, pushing the 'start' or 'stop' button is effectively make-work, since it could be automated as well. The rising tide of skill displacement will inevitably force a choice upon us: Either create millions of make-work 'jobs', for which people are paid ridiculous sums for doing essentially nothing, or simply pay everyone a base stipend, simply for living, so that they can continue to purchase things from the automated factories, making the factory owners ever more disproportionately wealthy.
On the other hand, you'd be donating information to researchers who are not as constrained by those pesky regulations regarding human genetic manipulation, so the world would be more likely to see the tangible results of your contribution sooner.
I got burned by purchasing Settlers 7 and was typically able to play less than an hour at a time before getting a "connection lost - you can't play anymore" dialog (on a single-player game on my own PC!). Because of Ubi's insane DRM, I just grabbed a pirate copy of From Dust last night. It's a cool game. Well worth the money, which I would otherwise have happily paid for it.