Watch the last season of Trailer Park Boys and you will see exactly this: A model train, the Swayze Express, brings dope through a pipe under the St. Laurence River into the USA, and cheap cigarettes are sent back by Sebastian Bach.
Absolutely. Well, it wouldn't necessarily be done by the federal government, but even when you consider how much money the students at California's public universities waste on lining the pockets of predatory publishers, and how much freaking nobel-prize-winning academic talent they have on their payroll, somebody should be able to connect the dots. Even if it's just physics, math and chemistry books - the savings in California alone might reach millions per year.
Exactly, this is my experience as well. I definitely get the equivalent of drug reps visiting my office hours and trying to sell me on the virtues of their books. I'm not interested in any of them, but I make a point to ask, after the mention of every title, "How much would this one cost my students? [evasive answer of the sort 'It's not much, I'd have to check...'] No, how much exactly?" Hopefully the reps will eventually report this sort of thing up the chain. And I'll even go further and say that I knowingly go right up to the edge of illegality to hook up my students with valuable readings that they don't have to pay for. The electronic library reserve system is the college student's best friend, and in some cases, it allows the textbook costs of my classes to sink to $0.
All the same, I find this a little bit comforting. Let's face it, this Bulldozer isn't AMD's finest hour. And I'm sure I wasn't the only one who had the thought "That's the best you can do with 2 billion transistors? It takes the edge off a bit that it's only 1.2 billion, and maybe - as you suggest - the frequency and consumption bottlenecks can be fixed with available process tech.
It seems like there has been some effort from the US to further increase tensions with Iran - including a string of three catastrophic, improbable but still officially accidental explosions at various Iranian industrial facilities. Add that to Stuxnet and targeted assassinations of Iran's brightest nerds, and it paints a pretty clear picture that we the West are trying to ratchet up tensions. On the other side, there are probably hardliners who are happy to play along. I don't like any of this escalation.
It's awesome that there are potentially millions of SC2 replays available for data mining. They're surprisingly tiny files. And I think the really cool research project would be to data mine those files for strategies that the AI could master on its own. Because I suck at SC2, I don't really want to go out and embarrass myself in games against other people, so I often play against the game's AI. I also - reflexively - pause the game sometimes, which would be really impolite against a human opponent. But the game's AI is outrageously predictable and linear in how it approaches the game. I'd like to hope that once researchers discover what makes a starcraft player good, they can translate this to an AI expert system and make it play like a good player. Like there are computer chess tournaments, wouldn't it be fun to have SC2 AI tournaments? We'd learn a lot about AI in the process, probably more than we ever did through writing chess programs.
That's what's routing my packets, and the firmware is the brilliant TomatoUSB. The reason why I have this router is that I wanted Gigabit lan, N wireless, Tomato support and a USB port for a network disk. I even successfully got a nice spindown script for the disk for those long stretches of time when it's not being read or written to. It all works brilliantly, and I bought it for $55 from NewEgg. My uptime has literally been 100% since I flashed to TomatoUSB. I don't think you can get a better deal if you're like me and insist on all these features.
If they send the money to honest charities like Oxfam, Unicef or Médecins Sans Frontières, they will probably just re-credit the transferred money back to the bank. And if they use some less scrupulous charity, well, that charity shouldn't be getting money in the first place. In any case, there's no real win here.
What would be really cool, though, is if Visa (to demonstrate their unbreachable security) set out a Hack-for-Oxfam challenge, in which any money that hackers manage to route to Oxfam would be stay with them and be considered a charitable donation from Visa. It would be great free publicity if the hackers failed, and a very good deed would be done if the hackers succeeded - plus, they could patch the exploited security holes.
If this sort of "spoiler" is enough to give away the game, then we better had not be relying on more security by obscurity! Let's replicate the research in "white hat" labs and develop a patch (vaccine) ASAP!
Yeah, and since we're off topic, isn't it a little crazy that we're closer now to "midnight" than in the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy himself thought that nuclear war is more likely than not to happen? I think that's silly. This planet has some resource problems, and climate change is real, but these are not existential threats, which is what the clock is supposed to measure. I think we've forgotten what it's like to live with the live possibility of being nuked into civilizational collapse.
Holy shit, if I were a supervillain, that's exactly the sort of institute that I'd want to run. They probably say: "What happens in Siberia stays in Siberia, except for the bits that were accidentally atomized. Those are floating around somewhere in the upper atmosphere." Also, they probably say: "In Siberia, a couple of people can hear you scream, but nobody really gives a fuck."
I don't think it's crazy for Apple to make a larger iPhone if they see a demand for it. But I do think it would be crazy if they eliminated to pocket-sized version. Many men keep their iPhones in a pocket, and without a cover, it just barely works - depending on the pocket. A phone with a 4" screen would just not be easily pocketable. Sure men could get purses too and carry their phones in there. Then the increase in size wouldn't matter so much. But most won't, if the only advantage they gain is having bigger phone to use.
This is making me think that Apple plans to split their iPhone market and introduce two simultaneous model lines, one bigger and one smaller. Yes, it's a little bit inelegant, but I'm sure they did their focus group research and decided that there is demand for this.
Let's think about all that we have learned from our manned space program in the last 30 years. And now let compare that to everything we've learned through our unmanned space program. What amazed us more, pictures from Hubble, or pictures from the ISS? Or was it shockingly detailed infrared pictures of the universe's first light? Or was it the ISS? Was it the amazing Mars landers? Was it the fact that a human-made probe made a soft landing on freaking TITAN??? Well it turns out that the ISS was more expensive that all those missions put together. That's largely because human exploration is just expensive and it's getting more expensive all the time. Alongside, robots are quickly closing the capability gap on us, and in 20 years I'm confident that they can do more on Mars than humans could.
In the 60's our robots sucked, lives were cheap, the Soviets were scary, the economy was pumping, the politicians were united behind NASA, and the Moon was close. Yes, that was the single coolest and most amazing thing that any space program has ever done. But we're fooling ourselves absurdly if we think that in the present day we can get our glory back by doing Mars. The conditions are different in every way.
And I think it would be terrible for the space program as well. Just like the ISS ate up an ungodly chunk of each year's Space budget (for what?) as serious and far cheaper science experiments got vetoed, a Mars mission would just *be* the NASA budget for three decades. It can't be denied that it would primarily be a prestige mission. There are much better ways to learn each and every one of the things we would learn on such a mission. But I think Americans want to do it because we feel like we're on the decline, and like all aging men, we want to get back on that horse and show that we've still got it. It's like the old dude who reminisces about that time he was 24 and hooked up with a model, and ends up buying a Porsche and a mountain of Cialis because he thinks he can relive those glory years. Yes, we're looking for an excuse to whip out our cocks again and scream madly about how we can piss all the way to Mars. But it's more than a little pathetic, not least because there is no political way that our political system could produce the huge volume of steady funding that such a project would require. If we try it, it will be mentioned in every two minute version of the history of the American empire, right at the end.
I was thinking something like that as well: The solution is to have a detachable self-powered last car. Suppose the train is passing through Baltimore on its way from DC to NY. All the passengers who want to get off there are asked to walk to the last wagon, which separates from the main train about 10 minutes before the station. It starts braking to make sure that there's enough room between it and the main train to safely throw a junction so the main train goes straight and the last wagon goes right and to the Baltimore station. Meanwhile, another wagon, already full of passengers from Baltimore, is accelerating and joining the main track. The main train will slow down a bit for the docking, and the passengers from the newly attached Baltimore wagon are shown to their seats. Once they're all out, the people who are getting off at the next station get into the last wagon and the process begins again. At busy stations, more than one "last" wagon could be used. As you said, the narrow connection point means that transfers would be slow, but on the other hand, if there are 20 minutes between "stops" that should allow for very leisurely transfers.
Yes, it is an improvement over the traditional book. Hopefully they've done a good job with it. But the real revolution will begin when this sort of thing is produced for free and released under an open source license. There are megatons of idle brainpower in the world who could do it. Hell, I bet we could get some of the world's top biologists to create content for it if some foundation paid for their sabbatical. Really, it's sad that the free version of such a product didn't happen first, but not all is lost. For a long time, all encyclopedias cost money. I'm sure they still make those, but when is the last time you were tempted to use one?
I'm hoping that the future of open courseware will also work this way. If there's one thing that's dumb to restrict in this world, it's access to educational materials. A much smarter business model for Nature would be to release this stuff for free, but accept money for administering achievement tests on the material.
Well, him and me - and actually most geeks I know. But like many things in our geeky lives, the resurrection of Firefly is pure fantasy. Everybody involved was actually talented and now has a flourishing career, probably making more money than they ever did in 2002-3. And they're all a whole lot older. It's just not gonna happen. But this doesn't change the fact that the cancellation of Firefly happened when the show was consistently excellent. It's no wonder that it's the go-to example of the unjustly cancelled show. So many people say this and it's become almost a cliche, but doesn't make it any less true.
What? It's not even close to true that Einstein showed Ptolemeic theory to be equivalent to Copernican theory. Ptolemeic theory postulated the existence of spheres of revolution, and epicycles on those spheres, and more refined versions had epicycles on the epicycles.
It's ok for you to be confused about physics. Many good people are. It's not ok for something this scientifically absurd to get modded +5 Insightful on a blog of nerds.
Exactly. And that difference is very important. It's quite an understatement to say that information-passing between unentangled states is "a bit more problematic" than EPR-style instant communication.
I didn't realize it was even possible to make such a big improvement in lossless image compression. The web definitely needs it - any smartphone user that pays by data volume can confirm this.
So if this battery has ten times the capacity of standard Lithium ion batteries, and after a year it's only five times more. That means its capacity falls off by 50% per year. I guess that would be fine for phones, but not so much for cars. It would be quite the environmental nightmare if car owners threw out their gigantic batteries every three years because the car had only 1/8 of the range it had when you drove it off the lot.
I totally agree. I like the name and the roomba analogy. I suspect that $1000 is an underestimate by an order of magnitude, and also that it won't be practical to make these things self-powering. It's much better to let them run on rechargeable batteries, like the roomba. That way they can also work at night. But yes, I really hope that this is the future of agriculture - and the near future, as near as possible!
This is a good point, but still, some AI would be useful. You don't want the human to sweat the details of every move the thing makes. And honestly (no disrespect to field workers), I can't think of a single piece of labor done in the fields that present-day AI couldn't handle. Remember, AI is a Moore's Law phenomenon - it will soon be trivially cheap. We're already clever enough to make electronic noses which can sniff the ripeness of a piece of fruit. The mechanics of harvesting, pulling weeds, pruning branches, applying fertilizer, and everything else I can think of, are at least as algorithmic as driving safely in traffic. And we've solved the latter with AI. The problem is that farm workers are too cheap to make it economical to build these robots. However, this will change within a couple of decades.
I don't think you're right. I think it's cities that will save us, so I'm all for getting people off the land and into dense cities. Here is a sampling of some of the good stuff this does:
Prosperity grows. There are more opportunities in cities to make use of every talent.
Literacy and educational achievement grows.
The gender gap shrinks; women become more empowered when they move off the land into cities.
Fertility decreases dramatically, largely as a result of the previously mentioned items. If you're worried about population growth, you don't need to. Many of the world's largest countries are already reproducing at below replacement value, which is to say that they'd be shrinking without immigration. The rest of the world is catching up. It's more likely that we'll have to worry about underpopulation.
Urban dwellers use less energy, despite being richer. In the US, the district with the lowest energy use per capita is Manhattan, and it's not because Manhattenites are penny pinchers.
Basically everything that drives modern economies happens in cities.
It's for these reasons and many more why I think that we should get almost every person into cities and leave the lands as close to wild as possible. Of course we'll need to use the land to grow food, but with good automation we can avoid the dangerously artificial monocultures that we see on farms today. And no matter what the population is, I'm for using as little land as possible for agriculture, leaving the rest wild (for recreation, and because wild lands are good in themselves).
About your fear regarding hostile EMPs knocking out our automated farming: There are much easier and straightforward ways to destroy civilizations. And even if you were a terrorist who could only do EMPs and nothing else, you'd still do a lot more damage if you did them in cities rather than just taking out some farming bots. If there's one thing I'm sure about, it's that humanity won't succumb to rural EMPs (unless they're caused by nukes).
The efficiency of farming (yield value per area+inputs) is going to have to grow a lot as global population increases and gets richer. This is obviously one step in that direction. Sure, this robot is laughably primitive compared to Google's self-driving car, but future generations will do better. I think that in 20 years, we'll be able to intersperse multiple simultaneous crops in the same field, which is good for the soil, reduces the need for fertilizer and pesticide, and generates a more value.
The most important reason why we don't see this sort of farming on a large scale is because it requires much more fine-motor work and is incompatible with the machines we use today. But once those machines get substantially cheaper and more dexterous than people, I think we'll make this transition. Our food will be better for it, and there will be more of it. I don't think that this is very far off in the future.
One thing I've noticed is that it's very hard to die. Your damage heals pretty quickly from you just walking it off. It's not like Oblivion where you had to be casting heal spells as you walked to anywhere. For now I have the strong feeling that I still suck at the game, but for all my sucking and bumbling, I can't seem to manage getting killed.
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Watch the last season of Trailer Park Boys and you will see exactly this: A model train, the Swayze Express, brings dope through a pipe under the St. Laurence River into the USA, and cheap cigarettes are sent back by Sebastian Bach.
Absolutely. Well, it wouldn't necessarily be done by the federal government, but even when you consider how much money the students at California's public universities waste on lining the pockets of predatory publishers, and how much freaking nobel-prize-winning academic talent they have on their payroll, somebody should be able to connect the dots. Even if it's just physics, math and chemistry books - the savings in California alone might reach millions per year.
Exactly, this is my experience as well. I definitely get the equivalent of drug reps visiting my office hours and trying to sell me on the virtues of their books. I'm not interested in any of them, but I make a point to ask, after the mention of every title, "How much would this one cost my students? [evasive answer of the sort 'It's not much, I'd have to check...'] No, how much exactly?" Hopefully the reps will eventually report this sort of thing up the chain. And I'll even go further and say that I knowingly go right up to the edge of illegality to hook up my students with valuable readings that they don't have to pay for. The electronic library reserve system is the college student's best friend, and in some cases, it allows the textbook costs of my classes to sink to $0.
All the same, I find this a little bit comforting. Let's face it, this Bulldozer isn't AMD's finest hour. And I'm sure I wasn't the only one who had the thought "That's the best you can do with 2 billion transistors? It takes the edge off a bit that it's only 1.2 billion, and maybe - as you suggest - the frequency and consumption bottlenecks can be fixed with available process tech.
It seems like there has been some effort from the US to further increase tensions with Iran - including a string of three catastrophic, improbable but still officially accidental explosions at various Iranian industrial facilities. Add that to Stuxnet and targeted assassinations of Iran's brightest nerds, and it paints a pretty clear picture that we the West are trying to ratchet up tensions. On the other side, there are probably hardliners who are happy to play along. I don't like any of this escalation.
It's awesome that there are potentially millions of SC2 replays available for data mining. They're surprisingly tiny files. And I think the really cool research project would be to data mine those files for strategies that the AI could master on its own. Because I suck at SC2, I don't really want to go out and embarrass myself in games against other people, so I often play against the game's AI. I also - reflexively - pause the game sometimes, which would be really impolite against a human opponent. But the game's AI is outrageously predictable and linear in how it approaches the game. I'd like to hope that once researchers discover what makes a starcraft player good, they can translate this to an AI expert system and make it play like a good player. Like there are computer chess tournaments, wouldn't it be fun to have SC2 AI tournaments? We'd learn a lot about AI in the process, probably more than we ever did through writing chess programs.
That's what's routing my packets, and the firmware is the brilliant TomatoUSB. The reason why I have this router is that I wanted Gigabit lan, N wireless, Tomato support and a USB port for a network disk. I even successfully got a nice spindown script for the disk for those long stretches of time when it's not being read or written to. It all works brilliantly, and I bought it for $55 from NewEgg. My uptime has literally been 100% since I flashed to TomatoUSB. I don't think you can get a better deal if you're like me and insist on all these features.
If they send the money to honest charities like Oxfam, Unicef or Médecins Sans Frontières, they will probably just re-credit the transferred money back to the bank. And if they use some less scrupulous charity, well, that charity shouldn't be getting money in the first place. In any case, there's no real win here.
What would be really cool, though, is if Visa (to demonstrate their unbreachable security) set out a Hack-for-Oxfam challenge, in which any money that hackers manage to route to Oxfam would be stay with them and be considered a charitable donation from Visa. It would be great free publicity if the hackers failed, and a very good deed would be done if the hackers succeeded - plus, they could patch the exploited security holes.
If this sort of "spoiler" is enough to give away the game, then we better had not be relying on more security by obscurity! Let's replicate the research in "white hat" labs and develop a patch (vaccine) ASAP!
Yeah, and since we're off topic, isn't it a little crazy that we're closer now to "midnight" than in the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy himself thought that nuclear war is more likely than not to happen? I think that's silly. This planet has some resource problems, and climate change is real, but these are not existential threats, which is what the clock is supposed to measure. I think we've forgotten what it's like to live with the live possibility of being nuked into civilizational collapse.
Holy shit, if I were a supervillain, that's exactly the sort of institute that I'd want to run. They probably say: "What happens in Siberia stays in Siberia, except for the bits that were accidentally atomized. Those are floating around somewhere in the upper atmosphere." Also, they probably say: "In Siberia, a couple of people can hear you scream, but nobody really gives a fuck."
I don't think it's crazy for Apple to make a larger iPhone if they see a demand for it. But I do think it would be crazy if they eliminated to pocket-sized version. Many men keep their iPhones in a pocket, and without a cover, it just barely works - depending on the pocket. A phone with a 4" screen would just not be easily pocketable. Sure men could get purses too and carry their phones in there. Then the increase in size wouldn't matter so much. But most won't, if the only advantage they gain is having bigger phone to use.
This is making me think that Apple plans to split their iPhone market and introduce two simultaneous model lines, one bigger and one smaller. Yes, it's a little bit inelegant, but I'm sure they did their focus group research and decided that there is demand for this.
Let's think about all that we have learned from our manned space program in the last 30 years. And now let compare that to everything we've learned through our unmanned space program. What amazed us more, pictures from Hubble, or pictures from the ISS? Or was it shockingly detailed infrared pictures of the universe's first light? Or was it the ISS? Was it the amazing Mars landers? Was it the fact that a human-made probe made a soft landing on freaking TITAN??? Well it turns out that the ISS was more expensive that all those missions put together. That's largely because human exploration is just expensive and it's getting more expensive all the time. Alongside, robots are quickly closing the capability gap on us, and in 20 years I'm confident that they can do more on Mars than humans could.
In the 60's our robots sucked, lives were cheap, the Soviets were scary, the economy was pumping, the politicians were united behind NASA, and the Moon was close. Yes, that was the single coolest and most amazing thing that any space program has ever done. But we're fooling ourselves absurdly if we think that in the present day we can get our glory back by doing Mars. The conditions are different in every way.
And I think it would be terrible for the space program as well. Just like the ISS ate up an ungodly chunk of each year's Space budget (for what?) as serious and far cheaper science experiments got vetoed, a Mars mission would just *be* the NASA budget for three decades. It can't be denied that it would primarily be a prestige mission. There are much better ways to learn each and every one of the things we would learn on such a mission. But I think Americans want to do it because we feel like we're on the decline, and like all aging men, we want to get back on that horse and show that we've still got it. It's like the old dude who reminisces about that time he was 24 and hooked up with a model, and ends up buying a Porsche and a mountain of Cialis because he thinks he can relive those glory years. Yes, we're looking for an excuse to whip out our cocks again and scream madly about how we can piss all the way to Mars. But it's more than a little pathetic, not least because there is no political way that our political system could produce the huge volume of steady funding that such a project would require. If we try it, it will be mentioned in every two minute version of the history of the American empire, right at the end.
I was thinking something like that as well: The solution is to have a detachable self-powered last car. Suppose the train is passing through Baltimore on its way from DC to NY. All the passengers who want to get off there are asked to walk to the last wagon, which separates from the main train about 10 minutes before the station. It starts braking to make sure that there's enough room between it and the main train to safely throw a junction so the main train goes straight and the last wagon goes right and to the Baltimore station. Meanwhile, another wagon, already full of passengers from Baltimore, is accelerating and joining the main track. The main train will slow down a bit for the docking, and the passengers from the newly attached Baltimore wagon are shown to their seats. Once they're all out, the people who are getting off at the next station get into the last wagon and the process begins again. At busy stations, more than one "last" wagon could be used. As you said, the narrow connection point means that transfers would be slow, but on the other hand, if there are 20 minutes between "stops" that should allow for very leisurely transfers.
Yes, it is an improvement over the traditional book. Hopefully they've done a good job with it. But the real revolution will begin when this sort of thing is produced for free and released under an open source license. There are megatons of idle brainpower in the world who could do it. Hell, I bet we could get some of the world's top biologists to create content for it if some foundation paid for their sabbatical. Really, it's sad that the free version of such a product didn't happen first, but not all is lost. For a long time, all encyclopedias cost money. I'm sure they still make those, but when is the last time you were tempted to use one?
I'm hoping that the future of open courseware will also work this way. If there's one thing that's dumb to restrict in this world, it's access to educational materials. A much smarter business model for Nature would be to release this stuff for free, but accept money for administering achievement tests on the material.
Well, him and me - and actually most geeks I know. But like many things in our geeky lives, the resurrection of Firefly is pure fantasy. Everybody involved was actually talented and now has a flourishing career, probably making more money than they ever did in 2002-3. And they're all a whole lot older. It's just not gonna happen. But this doesn't change the fact that the cancellation of Firefly happened when the show was consistently excellent. It's no wonder that it's the go-to example of the unjustly cancelled show. So many people say this and it's become almost a cliche, but doesn't make it any less true.
What? It's not even close to true that Einstein showed Ptolemeic theory to be equivalent to Copernican theory. Ptolemeic theory postulated the existence of spheres of revolution, and epicycles on those spheres, and more refined versions had epicycles on the epicycles.
It's ok for you to be confused about physics. Many good people are. It's not ok for something this scientifically absurd to get modded +5 Insightful on a blog of nerds.
Exactly. And that difference is very important. It's quite an understatement to say that information-passing between unentangled states is "a bit more problematic" than EPR-style instant communication.
I didn't realize it was even possible to make such a big improvement in lossless image compression. The web definitely needs it - any smartphone user that pays by data volume can confirm this.
So if this battery has ten times the capacity of standard Lithium ion batteries, and after a year it's only five times more. That means its capacity falls off by 50% per year. I guess that would be fine for phones, but not so much for cars. It would be quite the environmental nightmare if car owners threw out their gigantic batteries every three years because the car had only 1/8 of the range it had when you drove it off the lot.
I totally agree. I like the name and the roomba analogy. I suspect that $1000 is an underestimate by an order of magnitude, and also that it won't be practical to make these things self-powering. It's much better to let them run on rechargeable batteries, like the roomba. That way they can also work at night. But yes, I really hope that this is the future of agriculture - and the near future, as near as possible!
This is a good point, but still, some AI would be useful. You don't want the human to sweat the details of every move the thing makes. And honestly (no disrespect to field workers), I can't think of a single piece of labor done in the fields that present-day AI couldn't handle. Remember, AI is a Moore's Law phenomenon - it will soon be trivially cheap. We're already clever enough to make electronic noses which can sniff the ripeness of a piece of fruit. The mechanics of harvesting, pulling weeds, pruning branches, applying fertilizer, and everything else I can think of, are at least as algorithmic as driving safely in traffic. And we've solved the latter with AI. The problem is that farm workers are too cheap to make it economical to build these robots. However, this will change within a couple of decades.
It's for these reasons and many more why I think that we should get almost every person into cities and leave the lands as close to wild as possible. Of course we'll need to use the land to grow food, but with good automation we can avoid the dangerously artificial monocultures that we see on farms today. And no matter what the population is, I'm for using as little land as possible for agriculture, leaving the rest wild (for recreation, and because wild lands are good in themselves).
About your fear regarding hostile EMPs knocking out our automated farming: There are much easier and straightforward ways to destroy civilizations. And even if you were a terrorist who could only do EMPs and nothing else, you'd still do a lot more damage if you did them in cities rather than just taking out some farming bots. If there's one thing I'm sure about, it's that humanity won't succumb to rural EMPs (unless they're caused by nukes).
The efficiency of farming (yield value per area+inputs) is going to have to grow a lot as global population increases and gets richer. This is obviously one step in that direction. Sure, this robot is laughably primitive compared to Google's self-driving car, but future generations will do better. I think that in 20 years, we'll be able to intersperse multiple simultaneous crops in the same field, which is good for the soil, reduces the need for fertilizer and pesticide, and generates a more value.
The most important reason why we don't see this sort of farming on a large scale is because it requires much more fine-motor work and is incompatible with the machines we use today. But once those machines get substantially cheaper and more dexterous than people, I think we'll make this transition. Our food will be better for it, and there will be more of it. I don't think that this is very far off in the future.
One thing I've noticed is that it's very hard to die. Your damage heals pretty quickly from you just walking it off. It's not like Oblivion where you had to be casting heal spells as you walked to anywhere. For now I have the strong feeling that I still suck at the game, but for all my sucking and bumbling, I can't seem to manage getting killed.