I believe the "digital scents" technology was first brought to our attention as a way to enhance... games of course! You would have a little device on top of your monitor maybe, and you'd put in the scent cartridge that shipped with the game, and as you fragged your way through Quake you could smell the hot lava, and the reeking stench of dead ogres, and the acrid burning cordite as you blasted away with the nailgun... OK, not such an appealing example, but it'd be good for immersive adventure games or MMRPG's - you could walk into an EQ tavern and smell the beer and roast boar etc., or the pine needles in a forest.
Re: Diamond Age? Maybe...
on
3D Printers
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· Score: 1
Just imagine: this technology has the potential to completely destroy capitalism! The whole
supply/demand paradigm will be meaningless in a situation of infinite supply
Of course, it might destroy the demand for physical objects. Yes, services might still be worth money (entertainers, prostitutes, etc.), but other than that, the only thing you'll have to spend your money on will be... ENERGY! Because it's still needed to make all this "free" stuff. And even energy will probably be cheap as the Sahara is covered with mass-produced photovoltaic cells.
Oh wait. Are you an actor, musician or prostitute? No? What will you do all day, now that you don't have to work? Hmm, I know, PLAY WITH UNLIMITED LEGO! (see my previous post)
Oh yes. 3D-printing Lego would be so sweet! Of course, REAL Lego brand building toys are made from PBS plastic, which may not be amenable to the printing process. I dunno.
On a related toy-printing note, the Toybuilders.com link in the article is pretty interesting. I wonder if they'd print me off a full size broadsword in unbreakable epoxy?
(I was going to make the obligatory comment about "RealDolls for the instant-gratification set", but it's probably been said).
I don't think King is so much objecting to people not paying for multiple copies of his work, as he is to people downloading it 3x and only paying once, thus fouling the ability to gauge what percentage of *users* are paying. After all, if EVERYONE paid for a copy, but then downloaded 3 different formats, it'd look like only 33% of users were paying. Thus, an overwhelming success would appear to be a dismal failure! And then how can he tell how well the experiment is working?
The answer here is for people to download once, & convert the file themselves to the desired formats. Oh wait, most people are too lazy/incompetent to do that:-P
If the main telescope mirror has to be flat, why can't light be "piped" onto it by targetable accessory mirrors? Is there some reason that an apparatus of optically flat mirrors couldn't be used, in place of conventional telescopes where the whole thing moves? My only thought is that maybe the light would be diminished by being bounced around, and so maybe very dim objects couldn't be seen as well. And the accessory mirrors wouldn't require as massive a mount to hold them in place, would they?
Reading those gymnasts web diaries really brought home the reality of the Olympics, and personally, finding out what motivates
a 13 year old is very personally rewarding.
All sarcasm aside, I'd love to know how a 13-year-old feels about being at the Olympics! It might not be my top news story, but still could be interesting. And I'm not sure that the IOC should be restricting said 13-year-old from letting others read their personal writings about the experience, just because some US network wants "exclusive" rights to yakk on and on about how great Michael Johnson and company are and ignore every other country's athletes.
(Yes, I know there aren't supposed to be 13-year-olds at the games, I just said that for effect)
I really don't think most entertainment should be open source. What's the benefit? Part of the allure of watching entertainment is
to *not* know what's going on in the background.
So maybe you know what's "going on" under the hood, so to speak. Why shouldn't the game be just as fun? IANAP(rogrammer) but I can easily imagine how cool it would be to send my buddies a game I'd coded, or helped to code, and say "Deathmatch?:-)". Saying entertainment shouldn't be Open Source is a little too close to saying "I want all my diversions effort-free and prepackaged" for my liking. I watch as much TV as the next guy but I wouldn't enjoy it less if I got to help make it, or even just had some say in the plots... It just requires a little suspension of disbelief, like everything else.
I agree with rongen about the "presentation/content" issue. The good thing about ASCII text is that it's a) simple, b) easy to use, whether you're a coder or a user, and c) all that is needed for the vast majority of e-mails. I concede that if I want to write a love letter to my girlfriend I may want to draw little hearts and teddy bears all over it, and maybe I can't do that with an ASCII text message. But doesn't that suggest that maybe I should send it as an attachment (that's what they're for!) to a normal mail message? Adding an unneccessary proprietary format into the mix is just asking for trouble, and seems to be either M$ being evil, or M$ being lazy and not cooperatively helping to develop a new common standard that everyone can use.
Just install an overclocked server farm on the far side of the moon...
Well, it'd do well, for a while (assuming you had a way to dissipate CPU heat that didn't involve blowing air at it with a fan!). Of course, what you're forgetting is that the "far side" of the moon is NOT the "DARK side" of the moon. When the moon is between the sun and the Earth, your "far side server" would cook real nice in the unshielded sunlight.
(edit) Of course, there are some deep crater floors near the lunar poles which are probably in permanent darkness. You could try one of those. You'll still feel dumb when some socketed component thermo-creeps out of place and it costs you $500 million for a service call.
Of course, this "innovation" has been around for a while, but has been ruthlessly suppressed by a secret cabal of Razor Blade Manufacturing Industries. It could ruin their whole marketing model.
It's pretty amazing what (us) scientists can extrapolate from limited data (ie. the radionuclide composition of the rocks in this case). Of course, there's a lot of data to back these extrapolations up. But they are assumptions after all. The best we can do with the lucky strikes that fall into our laps so to speak, allowing us to analyse the geology of another planet!
Anyway, maybe Mars is geologically younger than we thought. Maybe this group of rocks is anomalous in some way. I guess we can only determine the difference if we stop pissing around and send somebody to Mars to see for themselves. The Mars Sample Return mission is a start, but it's extremely limited. Another "lucky strike" so to speak.
You should have said: "yanks" (I use the original term) "would be scared by a 1100 page book by someone they've not heard of before". I seem to recall The Stand selling quite well.
That said, the 4 volumes may not be such a bad idea. People might be more likely to take a chance on a new author's book if it's normal paperback size. Then, if they like it, they buy the others, and voila! $$ for publisher and author! If the reader does not enjoy volume 1, they will not buy the others and their badmouthing of said author will likely be minimal.
That said, this book sounds interesting. I wish I still had an attention span:-)
In Zubrin's Book, "The Case for Mars", I believe he suggests mounting video cameras on the balloon probes. A hi-res one to take useful pictures, and a lower-res one to take "navigational shots" which could be matched against previous photos taken from orbit.
Of course, the matching could be done rapidly by computer, then checked by people. With the knowledge of where the balloon was launched, you could narrow down the search area too. Then each "fix" would allow extrapolation of where the next photos come from, and so on.
This system, of course, is part of Zubrin's "Mars Direct" philosophy which claims that Lunar bases and other $$$ things are not prerequisites for a crewed Mars mission. He would probably include a "Martian GPS" like Marsnet in his "unneccessary" list.
Well, duh. I'm just a dumb Windows (L)user and even I know that:
1. Slashdot is "News for Nerds, Stuff that matters".
2. What good "nerd" hasn't enjoyed at least a couple of good anime movies, or railed against bad ones?
3. As part of our cultural zeitgeist, anime does "matter", because it shapes and is shaped by the world around us.
This "problem" only serves to underscore the neccessity for decent translation software. I'm not asking for a miracle-realtime-speech-translating thingy like on Star Trek, just software that can make a passable (ie. comprehensible) translation of a text.
You see, I believe one of the things computers should be able to do is overcome the limitations of the human ability to learn languages (quite difficult and time-consuming after about age 10) to let people communicate with each other, at least in text format. If services like Babelfish can translate crudely between European languages now, how long will it take before there's a version that can do it between Hindi and English, or Hindi and Mandarin for that matter? Not long, I hope.
For a start, here's one interesting link: WorldLingo. (Featuring Japanese-to-English! I don't know how well it works.)
(The irony of this joke is that until rather recently the RCMP had an active program to root out closeted homosexuals in their ranks. They used a "Fruit Machine" that measured skin galvanic response to gay porn images! I kid you not.)
I'd say that individual rights are pretty important here in Canada, just as they are in the USA. For example, IIRC there is a court case currently underway to prevent a citizens' group from distributing a list of names and addresses of known sex offenders. The rationale? These pervs^H^H^H^H^H people could be attacked, their houses burned etc. If that's not "individual rights over the collective" I don't know what is. I personally would be happy to see them castrated and hung, but that's not the way a civilized society works and I accept that, because ultimately it protects me too - what if someday, somebody thinks (wrongly of course) that I molested their child?.
Many Americans see Canada as being really socialist (or even, shudder, "Communist") but in reality our political status quo is pretty middle-of-the-road by world standards. Yeah, we have ultra-right parties, and communists, but in general we tend to elect a happy medium (lately, the Liberal Party). The others, in opposition, can exert influence in the House of Commons, just like what happens in the US Congress & Senate.
Yes, we do appoint judges and police chiefs (well, the gov't does). It's probably a good thing too. No Canadian ever became police chief by promising to run all the (insert visible minority here) out of town. No Canadian ever became a judge by promising to be "Maximum Bob".
Um, I think they mean games where you hold a plastic gun and shoot at the screen. Like, um, that cop one with the pink and blue Uzis on the console.
We Canadians simply don't feel the pressing need to promote handgun culture that some (note I said SOME) Americans do. And the ferry company has every right to decide which games to have on their boats. After all, this particular type of video game is pretty realistically violent, more so than clicking a mouse to fire the railgun.
As a cat owner, I have witnessed this behaviour, and usually a cat just clears the edge of the counter when it jumps up. You could rig a string about an inch above the lip of the counter attached to a sensor (pulley + rotation sensor?) which would prompt the robot to spray water.
Or you could go lower-tech and just use a mechanical contrivance... After all, the cat might just chew up your Mindstorms device:-)
It's an older voxel-based game with polygon buildings and vehivcles. The terrain is very well shaped though it's low on detail by today's standards. I especially like the desert missions where you're sneaking through canyons and popping up to fire off a few Hellfires... This sort of terrain really worked well with voxels. And Comanche 3 runs splendidly on a Pentium 166. (Now if only they hadn't implemented bag-of-hammers stupid wingmen it would be the perfect "classic" game)
Sounds like a great idea, go for it! Just make sure to use a well shock-protected HD or you'll have head touchdowns aplenty. Not a very good thing just before the big match. Oh, and if you can find a compressor small enough to fit inside the case without overheating it, you can even power those hydraulics!
It says the NIC can telnet. Anyone with a shell account can read e-mail using pine or whatever. Hell, if your ISP won't give you shell access you might as well be using webmail anyway.
For that matter, if you don't like web browsing using Navigator, you can always use lynx:-)
Let this be a lesson to all you little yahoos out there running around calling everything you don't like "gay". If it wasn't for Alan Turing, we'd all be playing Quake 3 on our abacuses.
After all, who wants some other person's wearables stealing processing cycles from their computer? Who wants someone's wearables piggybacking on their T1? (This ignores the performance aspects of shared processing over a radio link - see A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge). If it only worked with your own computer (like a cell phone which becomes a 900 mHz handset when you're at home) it might be okay.
I assume this is just a troll but I feel compelled to respond anyway...
There are more than 3 environments. Environment encompasses both the immediate nonliving (abiotic) surroundings, as well as biotic surroundings such as other species which are located close by. Species fill specific "vacancies" in the environment called niches, in a nutshell a niche is a "place in nature" where the species is well adapted and has less competition, and so can thrive. Species appear as a result of a) natural selection in the environment, and b) historical accident. I won't explain natural selection here, but historical accident is when random events (such as asteroid strikes or even a falling tree) quickly change the course of evolution in unpredictable ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, it might destroy the demand for physical objects. Yes, services might still be worth money (entertainers, prostitutes, etc.), but other than that, the only thing you'll have to spend your money on will be... ENERGY! Because it's still needed to make all this "free" stuff. And even energy will probably be cheap as the Sahara is covered with mass-produced photovoltaic cells.
Oh wait. Are you an actor, musician or prostitute? No? What will you do all day, now that you don't have to work? Hmm, I know, PLAY WITH UNLIMITED LEGO! (see my previous post)
On a related toy-printing note, the Toybuilders.com link in the article is pretty interesting. I wonder if they'd print me off a full size broadsword in unbreakable epoxy?
(I was going to make the obligatory comment about "RealDolls for the instant-gratification set", but it's probably been said).
The answer here is for people to download once, & convert the file themselves to the desired formats. Oh wait, most people are too lazy/incompetent to do that :-P
If the main telescope mirror has to be flat, why can't light be "piped" onto it by targetable accessory mirrors? Is there some reason that an apparatus of optically flat mirrors couldn't be used, in place of conventional telescopes where the whole thing moves? My only thought is that maybe the light would be diminished by being bounced around, and so maybe very dim objects couldn't be seen as well. And the accessory mirrors wouldn't require as massive a mount to hold them in place, would they?
All sarcasm aside, I'd love to know how a 13-year-old feels about being at the Olympics! It might not be my top news story, but still could be interesting. And I'm not sure that the IOC should be restricting said 13-year-old from letting others read their personal writings about the experience, just because some US network wants "exclusive" rights to yakk on and on about how great Michael Johnson and company are and ignore every other country's athletes.
(Yes, I know there aren't supposed to be 13-year-olds at the games, I just said that for effect)
So maybe you know what's "going on" under the hood, so to speak. Why shouldn't the game be just as fun? IANAP(rogrammer) but I can easily imagine how cool it would be to send my buddies a game I'd coded, or helped to code, and say "Deathmatch? :-)". Saying entertainment shouldn't be Open Source is a little too close to saying "I want all my diversions effort-free and prepackaged" for my liking. I watch as much TV as the next guy but I wouldn't enjoy it less if I got to help make it, or even just had some say in the plots... It just requires a little suspension of disbelief, like everything else.
Well, it'd do well, for a while (assuming you had a way to dissipate CPU heat that didn't involve blowing air at it with a fan!). Of course, what you're forgetting is that the "far side" of the moon is NOT the "DARK side" of the moon. When the moon is between the sun and the Earth, your "far side server" would cook real nice in the unshielded sunlight.
(edit) Of course, there are some deep crater floors near the lunar poles which are probably in permanent darkness. You could try one of those. You'll still feel dumb when some socketed component thermo-creeps out of place and it costs you $500 million for a service call.
Of course, this "innovation" has been around for a while, but has been ruthlessly suppressed by a secret cabal of Razor Blade Manufacturing Industries. It could ruin their whole marketing model.
Anyway, maybe Mars is geologically younger than we thought. Maybe this group of rocks is anomalous in some way. I guess we can only determine the difference if we stop pissing around and send somebody to Mars to see for themselves. The Mars Sample Return mission is a start, but it's extremely limited. Another "lucky strike" so to speak.
That said, the 4 volumes may not be such a bad idea. People might be more likely to take a chance on a new author's book if it's normal paperback size. Then, if they like it, they buy the others, and voila! $$ for publisher and author! If the reader does not enjoy volume 1, they will not buy the others and their badmouthing of said author will likely be minimal.
That said, this book sounds interesting. I wish I still had an attention span :-)
Of course, the matching could be done rapidly by computer, then checked by people. With the knowledge of where the balloon was launched, you could narrow down the search area too. Then each "fix" would allow extrapolation of where the next photos come from, and so on.
This system, of course, is part of Zubrin's "Mars Direct" philosophy which claims that Lunar bases and other $$$ things are not prerequisites for a crewed Mars mission. He would probably include a "Martian GPS" like Marsnet in his "unneccessary" list.
1. Slashdot is "News for Nerds, Stuff that matters".
2. What good "nerd" hasn't enjoyed at least a couple of good anime movies, or railed against bad ones?
3. As part of our cultural zeitgeist, anime does "matter", because it shapes and is shaped by the world around us.
Therefore, anime belongs on Slashdot.
You see, I believe one of the things computers should be able to do is overcome the limitations of the human ability to learn languages (quite difficult and time-consuming after about age 10) to let people communicate with each other, at least in text format. If services like Babelfish can translate crudely between European languages now, how long will it take before there's a version that can do it between Hindi and English, or Hindi and Mandarin for that matter? Not long, I hope.
For a start, here's one interesting link: WorldLingo. (Featuring Japanese-to-English! I don't know how well it works.)
(The irony of this joke is that until rather recently the RCMP had an active program to root out closeted homosexuals in their ranks. They used a "Fruit Machine" that measured skin galvanic response to gay porn images! I kid you not.)
Many Americans see Canada as being really socialist (or even, shudder, "Communist") but in reality our political status quo is pretty middle-of-the-road by world standards. Yeah, we have ultra-right parties, and communists, but in general we tend to elect a happy medium (lately, the Liberal Party). The others, in opposition, can exert influence in the House of Commons, just like what happens in the US Congress & Senate.
Yes, we do appoint judges and police chiefs (well, the gov't does). It's probably a good thing too. No Canadian ever became police chief by promising to run all the (insert visible minority here) out of town. No Canadian ever became a judge by promising to be "Maximum Bob".
We Canadians simply don't feel the pressing need to promote handgun culture that some (note I said SOME) Americans do. And the ferry company has every right to decide which games to have on their boats. After all, this particular type of video game is pretty realistically violent, more so than clicking a mouse to fire the railgun.
Or you could go lower-tech and just use a mechanical contrivance... After all, the cat might just chew up your Mindstorms device :-)
It's an older voxel-based game with polygon buildings and vehivcles. The terrain is very well shaped though it's low on detail by today's standards. I especially like the desert missions where you're sneaking through canyons and popping up to fire off a few Hellfires... This sort of terrain really worked well with voxels. And Comanche 3 runs splendidly on a Pentium 166. (Now if only they hadn't implemented bag-of-hammers stupid wingmen it would be the perfect "classic" game)
(yes, I know it was a joke.)
For that matter, if you don't like web browsing using Navigator, you can always use lynx :-)
Let this be a lesson to all you little yahoos out there running around calling everything you don't like "gay". If it wasn't for Alan Turing, we'd all be playing Quake 3 on our abacuses.
After all, who wants some other person's wearables stealing processing cycles from their computer? Who wants someone's wearables piggybacking on their T1? (This ignores the performance aspects of shared processing over a radio link - see A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge). If it only worked with your own computer (like a cell phone which becomes a 900 mHz handset when you're at home) it might be okay.
There are more than 3 environments. Environment encompasses both the immediate nonliving (abiotic) surroundings, as well as biotic surroundings such as other species which are located close by. Species fill specific "vacancies" in the environment called niches, in a nutshell a niche is a "place in nature" where the species is well adapted and has less competition, and so can thrive. Species appear as a result of a) natural selection in the environment, and b) historical accident. I won't explain natural selection here, but historical accident is when random events (such as asteroid strikes or even a falling tree) quickly change the course of evolution in unpredictable ways.