"Nader's Nazis"? Geez. You'd swear the guy had promised to kill babies or something. It's sad that some people get confused and angry once the # of political parties gets larger than two. I won't waste my time responding at length to this obvious troll but the Green Party hardly dreams of a "totalitarian state". A government that responds to forces other than money? Yes. If that's totalitarianism, sign me up, Ralphie baby!
A lot of people see it this way: we could hugely improve conditions for the poor and homeless using the money which is wasted by inefficient and corrupt government, or squandered on stupid pointless weapons systems. It's not an either/or proposition. We *should* be able to both explore space and look after people on Earth, but our leaders (I'm Canadian but believe me our gov't is just as bad) choose to waste our tax money making themselves and their supporters/friends richer and more powerful. Also, I think a lot of things are done backwards - there should be no place for corporate profits in health care or prisons for example, but the X-prize (which seems to be going nowhere) seems to have really stimulated the idea that innovative, economical launch systems can be created by private concerns. As it is now of course, HMO's run health care, and NASA struggles to get into space, underfunded by government and overcharged by pork-barreling defense/areospace contractors.
As another comment here says, the shuttle centrifuge experiments use very small radii. The human body does get disoriented when the head and feet have very different gravitational environments! You need a larger radius to avoid this. Think of the rotating ship section in "2001" - it was about 10 metres across. That would be much better. Of course the way NASA works, if it doesn't fit on the ISS or in the shuttle cargo bay, it doesn't happen...
Robert Zubrin puts forward a credible scheme in his (rather biased but scientifically thorough) book "The Case for Mars". You send an unmanned return vehicle ahead, with a fuel generator to make fuel from the Martian atmosphere (yes, it's possible). The crew only goes once there's a ticket home already there. For added safety, you send two return vehicles. The crew has a rover so they can drive to the nearest ascent vehicle when their time is up, and everything's cool. Meanwhile, there's a habitat left behind which you can use to start a persistent presence there.
Human feces needs to be composted in order to be particularly useful for growing plants. So it's part of the solution, but just a starting point. And "soil" is an incredibly subtle and complex mixture which is extremely hard to "put together" from its separate ingredients. I guess that's an area where humble soil scientists can contribute to the space program. Still, you're right about the value of that much orbiting biomass. It seems stupid to just throw it away.
Seeing as it's Clear Channel (whose concert promotions arm is huge and brings in 100's of millions of $), they may be able to force artists/their labels to agree to sales of these CD's. No live CD rights, no concert. I don't know how diversified the concert promotion market is but I bet CC is at least one of a very small # of 500-pound gorillas in the industry.
This actually would be cool for smaller bands who put on smaller shows. It'd be nice to have a recording which contains all the stuff that happened while you were there - the mic mix ups, the silly stage patter where the lead singer says how he got lost in your town during college etc. But I can easily see the band getting screwed on this and that's not what I want either!
I think the large start-up cost is probably one of the prohibitive factors. Nobody's going to finance a setup like that when it's entirely possible that the wanking public will HATE the virtual stars and avoid the videos like the plague (or more appropriately, gonnorrhea). Vivid Video aren't going to risk their current, wildly lucrative production model on the off chance that synthespians can make it in pr0n. From what I understand, a lot of pr0n consumers have favourite stars, whom they creepily worship and follow closely (literally, in some cases). None of that lot would likely take too well to virtual stars when they're used to the Jenna Jamesons and others of the current biz.
Also, as mentioned it's a small elite who command high prices for doing porn videos. There's a huge low-budget industry which consists of some guy paying a girl to have sex with him while _he_ films it. I mean - no cameraman - how much more low-budget can you go? Just a couple hundred to the girl, a few bucks for some pina colada mix* and poof! You have video you can sell or put on your own web site. And people are buying, so clearly the synthespians are not needed there either.
Jeez, the things aren't supposed to heal wounds. they're to keep those tiny yet gushing wounds from bleeding disproportionately, all over your clothes/model airplanes/term paper.
For the record, I suspect that on the average, Americans have about the same level of dental health as Europeans. Austin Powers notwithstanding.
... look at Heinlein. The man was incapable of writing a female character who wasn't either a total slut, or a super-capable total slut. Yet he seemed rather prudish in real life - I dimly remember reading part of his (posthumously) published letters where he's bemoaning the sexual deviance of "young people" who engage in "soixante-neuf and all sort of other perversions". This from the man who wrote "Friday" and "Stranger in a Strange Land"...
Re:Do NOT stand in front of one, though....
on
Potato Bazookas
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· Score: 1
Damned if that potato didn't punch a perfect 4 inch hole through that board. As the potato emerged on the far side though, it almost completely stripped off the last ply layer from the board.
It's called spalling. The same thing happens to tank armour when a shell penetrates. Except instead of flying plywood you have "flying molten armour plate". Not too pretty. Good thing nobody was on the other side of the plywood, huh?
On the other hand, if you need to input a 500-year old work in Cyrillic, it just might be worth doing it by hand, or hiring a Russian typist to input it if you have a bunch of hot dates that week or something. After all, this hypothetical Cyrillic book must be pretty important, huh?
You should care about their problems, because they tend to become your problems if the big corps are left to solve them by their preferred means. "Preferred means" = passing costs on to the customer, limiting customer choice, cutting jobs to boost share price, suppressing criticism with SLAPP suits, etc.
Note, I'm not advocating we sympathize with them. But the gov't and citizenry have no obligation, and often no material interest, in helping corporations out of holes they dug themselves. Nor should we allow them to compound their mistakes to the detriment of the greater good. This especially goes for "industries" like the recorded music companies, who victimize both their resource base (the artists, via usurious contracts) and their customers (by predatory pricing and anticompetitive actions).
Righteous Babe Records (Ani DiFranco's label) is on that list. Should I boycott them to protest against behaviour which is predominantly the work of the big evil labels? Seems counterproductive to me. After all, Ani's CD's have "Unauthorized duplication, while sometimes neccessary, is never as good as the real thing" on them.
Hey! Avril Lavigne is attractive enough (for a teenager). She's also banal, punk-lite and overmarketed. To be fair, I too am sick of seeing her mug on every magazine, so I can sort of feel your pain...
The -ware books (Software, Wetware, Hardware) were some of the biggest steaming piles I ever read, outside of Star Trek novels. Is this one any better, or does it have the same assortment of cardboard characters, idiotic chattiness in the most dire situations, and deus-ex-machina super technologies?
But they can sue YOU for telling us all about this circumvention technique. After all, the BF1942 CD has "substantial non-infringing use"... But you chose to tell us how to utilize its one infringing use:-)
imagine a Sim talking to a Stromtrooper while an Ultima Online player rode by on a horse!
This would seriously "break the fourth wall", I think. Besides, why would you have to have the same avatar in the "break room"/Metaverse as in the game? If you're out-of-character anyway... (and if you're not OOC then I imagine Stormtroopers aren't very interesting conversationalists!)
People (especially the internet-savvy/hacker types who hang around here, or at Cryptome) just don't trust the guv'mint, or law enforcement agencies. They give us many, many reasons to believe that any information of this type may be used to subvert our civil rights or surveil (is that a word?) us without good reason. The "freedoms granted by the government" are really just a subset of the freedoms we should have, were the government not restricting many of those already. I say, work to change the rules, AND in the meantime, subvert them. You are bang on in that traditional civil disobedience includes accepting the penalties for your actions, partly because doing so tends to increase sympathy for your cause. But I can't really blame people for being reluctant to "get caught", not all of us are as strong as Gandhi...
I have to admit that while Gibson's vision of a bizarre corporate clan, so detached from normal morality and laws as to be rendered barely human, is certainly great writing, it seems less and less likely as time goes on. Corporations grow more and more transnational, less and less attached to physical reality, and in doing so they become ever more like acerebral beasts run by a hippocampal mass of shareholders with short-term profits as the overwhelming driving force. CEO's and VP's are disposable plug-in modules, and hereditary family ownership of significant blocks of shares grows rare.
Hmm, I grow weary. Time to climb back in the cryo-pod and activate 2No Such Agency in my place...
...a self-drying jacket, autolace shoes, flat-tvs that play the scenery channel, and pizzas the size of my palm that come out fresh.
Autolace shoes, huh? You, my friend, are a prime candidate for a fastening technology called "velcro". It looks terribly fashionable on a pair of runners too;-)
They're the size of (old ST) or smaller than (Next Gen) current mobile phones. They require no towers, and are never "out of the service area". They can communicate with each other and with orbiting spacecraft in all but the most extreme weather or radiation conditions and also serve as precise homing signals for the transporter etc. Definitely still a science fiction technology.
They are our guests, and they shouldn't expect that we give them the keys and the kitchen sink.
No, it's more like "they're your guests, and you won't let them help you do the dishes because you're afraid they might steal the silverware, despite having no evidence at all to suggest they would". Yes, I'm stretching the metaphor but I feel it had to be said. "Foreign" does not equal "future terrorist" any more (or any less) than "U.S. citizen" does. We've forgotten McVeigh and Nichols *so* quickly. And the anthrax mailer remains mysteriously at large...
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"Nader's Nazis"? Geez. You'd swear the guy had promised to kill babies or something. It's sad that some people get confused and angry once the # of political parties gets larger than two. I won't waste my time responding at length to this obvious troll but the Green Party hardly dreams of a "totalitarian state". A government that responds to forces other than money? Yes. If that's totalitarianism, sign me up, Ralphie baby!
A lot of people see it this way: we could hugely improve conditions for the poor and homeless using the money which is wasted by inefficient and corrupt government, or squandered on stupid pointless weapons systems. It's not an either/or proposition. We *should* be able to both explore space and look after people on Earth, but our leaders (I'm Canadian but believe me our gov't is just as bad) choose to waste our tax money making themselves and their supporters/friends richer and more powerful. Also, I think a lot of things are done backwards - there should be no place for corporate profits in health care or prisons for example, but the X-prize (which seems to be going nowhere) seems to have really stimulated the idea that innovative, economical launch systems can be created by private concerns. As it is now of course, HMO's run health care, and NASA struggles to get into space, underfunded by government and overcharged by pork-barreling defense/areospace contractors.
As another comment here says, the shuttle centrifuge experiments use very small radii. The human body does get disoriented when the head and feet have very different gravitational environments! You need a larger radius to avoid this. Think of the rotating ship section in "2001" - it was about 10 metres across. That would be much better. Of course the way NASA works, if it doesn't fit on the ISS or in the shuttle cargo bay, it doesn't happen...
Robert Zubrin puts forward a credible scheme in his (rather biased but scientifically thorough) book "The Case for Mars". You send an unmanned return vehicle ahead, with a fuel generator to make fuel from the Martian atmosphere (yes, it's possible). The crew only goes once there's a ticket home already there. For added safety, you send two return vehicles. The crew has a rover so they can drive to the nearest ascent vehicle when their time is up, and everything's cool. Meanwhile, there's a habitat left behind which you can use to start a persistent presence there.
Human feces needs to be composted in order to be particularly useful for growing plants. So it's part of the solution, but just a starting point. And "soil" is an incredibly subtle and complex mixture which is extremely hard to "put together" from its separate ingredients. I guess that's an area where humble soil scientists can contribute to the space program. Still, you're right about the value of that much orbiting biomass. It seems stupid to just throw it away.
Seeing as it's Clear Channel (whose concert promotions arm is huge and brings in 100's of millions of $), they may be able to force artists/their labels to agree to sales of these CD's. No live CD rights, no concert. I don't know how diversified the concert promotion market is but I bet CC is at least one of a very small # of 500-pound gorillas in the industry.
This actually would be cool for smaller bands who put on smaller shows. It'd be nice to have a recording which contains all the stuff that happened while you were there - the mic mix ups, the silly stage patter where the lead singer says how he got lost in your town during college etc. But I can easily see the band getting screwed on this and that's not what I want either!
I think the large start-up cost is probably one of the prohibitive factors. Nobody's going to finance a setup like that when it's entirely possible that the wanking public will HATE the virtual stars and avoid the videos like the plague (or more appropriately, gonnorrhea). Vivid Video aren't going to risk their current, wildly lucrative production model on the off chance that synthespians can make it in pr0n. From what I understand, a lot of pr0n consumers have favourite stars, whom they creepily worship and follow closely (literally, in some cases). None of that lot would likely take too well to virtual stars when they're used to the Jenna Jamesons and others of the current biz.
Also, as mentioned it's a small elite who command high prices for doing porn videos. There's a huge low-budget industry which consists of some guy paying a girl to have sex with him while _he_ films it. I mean - no cameraman - how much more low-budget can you go? Just a couple hundred to the girl, a few bucks for some pina colada mix* and poof! You have video you can sell or put on your own web site. And people are buying, so clearly the synthespians are not needed there either.
* yes, for that. How do I know all this? The diary of a low-budget pornographer (mostly not safe for work)...
Jeez, the things aren't supposed to heal wounds. they're to keep those tiny yet gushing wounds from bleeding disproportionately, all over your clothes/model airplanes/term paper.
For the record, I suspect that on the average, Americans have about the same level of dental health as Europeans. Austin Powers notwithstanding.
Well, apparently Hollywood no longer has the patience to market "shiny things" to the clamoring public in a metaphorical form.
... look at Heinlein. The man was incapable of writing a female character who wasn't either a total slut, or a super-capable total slut. Yet he seemed rather prudish in real life - I dimly remember reading part of his (posthumously) published letters where he's bemoaning the sexual deviance of "young people" who engage in "soixante-neuf and all sort of other perversions". This from the man who wrote "Friday" and "Stranger in a Strange Land"...
Damned if that potato didn't punch a perfect 4 inch hole through that board. As the potato emerged on the far side though, it almost completely stripped off the last ply layer from the board.
It's called spalling. The same thing happens to tank armour when a shell penetrates. Except instead of flying plywood you have "flying molten armour plate". Not too pretty. Good thing nobody was on the other side of the plywood, huh?
On the other hand, if you need to input a 500-year old work in Cyrillic, it just might be worth doing it by hand, or hiring a Russian typist to input it if you have a bunch of hot dates that week or something. After all, this hypothetical Cyrillic book must be pretty important, huh?
We're talking lower in the chain than 14-year-old AOL girls here.
They may be 14-year-old AOL girls, but they're GIRLS. That gives you bonus points in the "chain", if I recall correctly.
You should care about their problems, because they tend to become your problems if the big corps are left to solve them by their preferred means. "Preferred means" = passing costs on to the customer, limiting customer choice, cutting jobs to boost share price, suppressing criticism with SLAPP suits, etc.
Note, I'm not advocating we sympathize with them. But the gov't and citizenry have no obligation, and often no material interest, in helping corporations out of holes they dug themselves. Nor should we allow them to compound their mistakes to the detriment of the greater good. This especially goes for "industries" like the recorded music companies, who victimize both their resource base (the artists, via usurious contracts) and their customers (by predatory pricing and anticompetitive actions).
Righteous Babe Records (Ani DiFranco's label) is on that list. Should I boycott them to protest against behaviour which is predominantly the work of the big evil labels? Seems counterproductive to me. After all, Ani's CD's have "Unauthorized duplication, while sometimes neccessary, is never as good as the real thing" on them.
Boycott companies, not the RIAA.
Hey! Avril Lavigne is attractive enough (for a teenager). She's also banal, punk-lite and overmarketed. To be fair, I too am sick of seeing her mug on every magazine, so I can sort of feel your pain...
The -ware books (Software, Wetware, Hardware) were some of the biggest steaming piles I ever read, outside of Star Trek novels. Is this one any better, or does it have the same assortment of cardboard characters, idiotic chattiness in the most dire situations, and deus-ex-machina super technologies?
But they can sue YOU for telling us all about this circumvention technique. After all, the BF1942 CD has "substantial non-infringing use"... But you chose to tell us how to utilize its one infringing use :-)
imagine a Sim talking to a Stromtrooper while an Ultima Online player rode by on a horse!
This would seriously "break the fourth wall", I think. Besides, why would you have to have the same avatar in the "break room"/Metaverse as in the game? If you're out-of-character anyway... (and if you're not OOC then I imagine Stormtroopers aren't very interesting conversationalists!)
People (especially the internet-savvy/hacker types who hang around here, or at Cryptome) just don't trust the guv'mint, or law enforcement agencies. They give us many, many reasons to believe that any information of this type may be used to subvert our civil rights or surveil (is that a word?) us without good reason. The "freedoms granted by the government" are really just a subset of the freedoms we should have, were the government not restricting many of those already. I say, work to change the rules, AND in the meantime, subvert them. You are bang on in that traditional civil disobedience includes accepting the penalties for your actions, partly because doing so tends to increase sympathy for your cause. But I can't really blame people for being reluctant to "get caught", not all of us are as strong as Gandhi...
Good points. I must have been asleep at the button writing that... And I'd better re-read Neuromancer :-)
I have to admit that while Gibson's vision of a bizarre corporate clan, so detached from normal morality and laws as to be rendered barely human, is certainly great writing, it seems less and less likely as time goes on. Corporations grow more and more transnational, less and less attached to physical reality, and in doing so they become ever more like acerebral beasts run by a hippocampal mass of shareholders with short-term profits as the overwhelming driving force. CEO's and VP's are disposable plug-in modules, and hereditary family ownership of significant blocks of shares grows rare.
Hmm, I grow weary. Time to climb back in the cryo-pod and activate 2No Such Agency in my place...
...a self-drying jacket, autolace shoes, flat-tvs that play the scenery channel, and pizzas the size of my palm that come out fresh.
;-)
Autolace shoes, huh? You, my friend, are a prime candidate for a fastening technology called "velcro". It looks terribly fashionable on a pair of runners too
They're the size of (old ST) or smaller than (Next Gen) current mobile phones. They require no towers, and are never "out of the service area". They can communicate with each other and with orbiting spacecraft in all but the most extreme weather or radiation conditions and also serve as precise homing signals for the transporter etc. Definitely still a science fiction technology.
They are our guests, and they shouldn't expect that we give them the keys and the kitchen sink.
No, it's more like "they're your guests, and you won't let them help you do the dishes because you're afraid they might steal the silverware, despite having no evidence at all to suggest they would". Yes, I'm stretching the metaphor but I feel it had to be said. "Foreign" does not equal "future terrorist" any more (or any less) than "U.S. citizen" does. We've forgotten McVeigh and Nichols *so* quickly. And the anthrax mailer remains mysteriously at large...