I'm personally not religious, but I have no problem with people who are, as long as they don't act stupidly (being an American, this is something I see far too often). When taking a stupid position on a social issue can be observed directly to lead to a giant spike in defection, along with a corresponding giant financial loss, I think this gives the Church of Finland plenty of incentive to reconsider their social policies to keep up with social progress. Basically, they need to keep their customers happy for the money to continue to roll in. When opting out is easy, that just makes their work harder.
I have no doubt that this will be a good thing for the Finnish church in the long run, and it might be a good thing for the Christian religion altogether, because the progress that will be made by the Finns will, with time, possibly trickle into the church teachings in other countries.
There are software competitions in chess, and they're getting pretty exciting now that the software can play at a grandmaster level. I think it would be pretty cool if this sort of thing made it into games like Starcraft. In any case, I'm happy that bots and their authors are getting some prizes and recognition, because I think their work is incredibly important and fertile. Bots are out future.
Yeah, I was thinking that the dark side would make for an awesome heat sink and you could get an amazing amount of tappable heat flow from the light to the dark side. In fact, that might be one way of checking whether the planet has technological life: Is the dark side significantly warmer than it "should" be? If so, it might be because someone is exploiting the energy differential. Of course, we probably won't ever get a good enough look at this thing to be able to tell.
Look at countries with competing religions like Israel, Sudan, Iraq, etc. You're right that Civ4 made religion purely a source of contentedness and docility, but the countries I mentioned are not exactly either. That's a part of the problem with that implementation.
A part of the problem is that there wasn't a way to advance past religion. Even if you had a communistic government, your cities would keep their religions. In the real world, as civilizations advance, religions recede. I'm not sure why this didn't happen in Civ4. Also, a country full of "warring" and incompatible religions would never collapse under social strife, as happens in the real world. I mean, the Shiites and Sunnis are all Muslims, but they can't seem to be able to live in a stable country. There should be giant penalties for Civ's like this. But noo, all religion does is make your people "happy". I'm prepared to believe that a tank can be disabled by a spear-chucker, but this is ridiculous.
As a US permanent resident, I get iris scanned and fingerprinted every time I enter the US. Or at least I thought that's what it was - I'm always asked to look into some scope with my right eye. This happens every fucking time. Now there's even a separate "permanent residents" line at Terminal 4 in JFK, and wouldn't you know it, it moves at a glacial speed. BTW, this country is seriously starting to suck.
Wow, live streaming from telephones? You know what would be really awesome? If you could arrange it somehow with another person to be streaming their voice over telephone while you stream yours, and then you could both "tune in" to each others' streams. Then you could basically have a voice conversation with each other, using nothing but phones! Technology moves so fast!
I'd love for there to be some sort of automatic control system that takes measurements and makes optimal adjustments in titration, temperature, etc. I imagine that this would potentially be a cheap part with a USB plug. But even with this, who will invite people to their house for algae and crackers? And when guests ask for the bathroom, the answer is "Are you sure you don't want to just fertilize the algae? Anyway, want more crackers?"
I think that here is a case where the hippies really have it wrong. If algae is ever going to become a regular part of our diet, it will be grown in factory-scale facilities, not in aquariums that block our windows. Also, I'd like geneticists to engineer a better flavor for it than "seaweed".
Right now, Assange is just doing too much at wikileaks. If they are to fight a media war against bare-knuckled organizations that don't share their love of sunshine, they have to think more tactically. Assange is a single point of failure. He might be a rapist (I won't judge yet), and in any case, the last few weeks have proven that he is personally take-down-able. This has become far too much about him personally, and far too little about the leaks. That's why Wikileaks needs joint, distributed leadership. Should future leaders happen to "turn out to" be tax evaders, visa violators, horse thieves or child porn addicts, they get out of the way, concentrate on their defense, and leave Wikileaks in the charge of others. This is how rebellions are always organized, and it's with good reason.
On most such roads, trucks are usually also not allowed out of the left lane. Yeah, if truckers were weaving about like typical amateur drivers, you can bet that it would be pretty damn unsafe. Also, the difference between 65 and 90 is quite a bit bigger. So you're going 90 in the passing lane and a guy who wants to go 65 gets in front of you because he's passing someone going 60. That's the kind of thing that would be happening all the time.
I find the safest way to drive is to go with the flow of traffic (even if it's fast, or insane like it was in Greece when I rented a car there). But having a road where cars abide by two very different speed limits makes this impossible. The constant, awkward interaction between 65-drivers and 90-drivers would be far more dangerous than if everyone just went 90.
That's not necessarily the case. Have you ever driven on Nevada roads? You can go 90, take a brief nap, and still be perfectly safe. I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. Germany has some roads without any speed limit whatsoever, and they're safer than comparable roads elsewhere in Europe.
Now I can always tell myself: Hey, maybe I'm a lonely American guy (sadly true these days), but it could be soo much worse: I could be a lonely Japanese guy! Wow, that sounds depressing as hell! The saddest thing I do is... post on Slashdot, I guess! I thank the Japanese for helping me realize just how far from the rock bottom I really am!
Most people posting don't seem to acknowledge that there wouldn't be any people doing mining with five miles of water above them. This would all be done by autonomous robots. Quite honestly, I like the idea, as long as it doesn't pollute the water (I don't see why it should, if it's just the mechanical removal of stuff).
One reason why I love the idea of autonomous mining is because I want this sort of thing to happen on the moon. That ore, processed on the lunar surface, can be shot into orbit with a simple railgun and get used for whatever we want, like a permanent space station at a liberation point.
Debugging the technique in a hostile place on Earth sounds like a good idea to me.
Both of those links are very cool, thank you! In the first, I didn't like the virtual dice, and the stupid dramatic delays, but the concept seems good. I was picturing this as more of an app on touchpads that people would own for other reasons, not one giant table-sized touchpad. But then again, I can imagine that there might be some other cool apps for a table-sized touchpad, like those in your second link. Since table-sized HDTVs are becoming affordable, maybe this really is the way to go. That multitouch pong game they were playing really did look kind of fun! Still, I'd want the players and the GM to have their own screens for the character sheet, etc. There could be mounts on the central table so they don't obstruct anything.
But that's what I'm talking about. You'd be around a table with friends. It's just that your character sheet would be a touchpad. You'd roll your dice on it and it would do some of the tedious number-crunching so that you could get on with the face-to-face interaction. Also, your rulebooks would be software in the touchpad.
I thought about this quite a bit: I don't think it will be long before a major RPG system like D&D publishes an entirely paper-free edition, where the players and the DM all have touchpads. Instead of miniatures, you have avatars of your character on the game board, and certain combat actions (like determining whether a hit landed) can be automated. Basically, the "I attack this guy with my +3 sword" command would be selected on your digital character sheet, and then you just get a prompt to roll a d20 on your touchpad. All the stuff about armor adjustments, size compensation, and whatever other rules, would be calculated automatically.
I can't wait for this obvious streamlining step. I think it will most benefit rule-heavy games like Hackmaster, which are a lot more fun than D&D but rather tedious when combat situations get big. Once we get used to this, we can actually make the hit and damage modifier system even more complicated and realistic, because using weapon speed factors, armor type modifiers, armor damage, hit location determination, etc. will actually not slow down the game at all. This stuff can return the focus of the personal interaction to where it should be, which is fantasy and role-playing. As a bonus, combat rounds can be rendered and animated once this gets good enough to help with immersion.
It won't be long before the purchase of a nice touchpad will cost you less than the purchase of a set of D&D rulebooks. Then, instead of reading about character creation, it will make much more sense to just load up the character creation wizard on the touchpad and start rolling. In more advanced versions, the software will show you the first-person view of "what you see" when you kick down a door. This really is the first step.
Let me say that I really, really like this sort of a challenge. 26 Amps at 120V would definitely trip my home's circuit breaker, but it's a certainly an amount of power that's available to mere mortals. I have a feeling that we'll be surprised by all the creative ways the contestants will find to save watts. Since there is no size/clumsiness limit, I have a feeling that the cooling will be done by water pumped from a giant, passively cooling reservoir. (Well, there was a vague mention of "racks" - so maybe that won't fly.) But I genuinely wonder what sort of architecture will have the advantage here. My money is on ARM. Anyway, what's cool is that the result will be an awesome machine which could actually run in your house, and that's pretty sweet.
The nice thing about Civ4 and earlier was that the appearance of the land quickly and clearly conveyed information about what was there and its role in game terms. In an effort to make the landscape look more natural, I worry that this information might be more hidden. If so, that would be a bad decision.
Yes, thank you, this is what I thought all along - a fairly slow ship carrying lots of data (maybe millions of genomes) etched on tons of lead foil, which is wrapped up in a sphere that shields a core in which the sensitive stuff is kept. That stuff will be: reproductive cells for many humans and animals, gestation machines that can bring the eggs of fertilized mammals to term, seeds of many important plants, important microorganisms, a very fault-tolerant computer with an excellent parenting AI, and all the gear and goo needed to make it all work.
It would be a massive undertaking, but everything necessary to make it work is either already invented or it's on the technological horizon. If we don't destroy civilization in the next 200 years, we'll be able to do it. This realization, in connection with the Fermi paradox, is a little scary to me.
What Microsoft completely failed to appreciate is the need to make good mobile OSes. If Windows CE hadn't been such a pathetic afterthought, and if it had been given away for free to suffocate the rest of the market, MS would have been in a pretty good place right now. They should have been leveraging their monopoly into other markets, and they would have gotten away with it if they had even had an actively-developed product for the mobile market.
Microsoft just got complacent and lazy, because they were too accustomed to people buying their core products no matter how shitty they were. BillG knew that when they move into a new field, they actually have to win on quality. Office did this, IE4 did this, DirectX did this, but that's about the end of the list.
Apple doesn't magically create compelling products because they're a charmed company. They have to drop lots of money on designers, UI research, testing and all that stuff. None of those things are our of reach for MS. They just don't research, focus and blitz the way Apple does. Maybe the government lawsuits had something to do with it. Steve Jobs asks his board every week: Where do I want to jab my sharp elbows today? They research it and come back with a plan for new conquests. Microsoft seems to be focused on answering the complaints from their present customers. There's no vision there. Sometimes, when their lunch gets eaten, they respond with Zunes, Xboxes and Bings - also-ran products that, at best, slightly improve on the established players that they ape. Witness the recent effort to make Hotmail relevant again! It reminds me of Communist countries who thought the best response to Western temptations is to make homegrown "equivalents" for Levi's and Coca Cola. Not long after this pathetic attempt, Communism collapsed.
Apple and Google are sniffing around for unfilled needs, and designing products to fill them. Microsoft is looking at filled needs, and asking "how can we get in on this and also fill these needs?" Maybe that's in their DNA, because they got rich from an OS that basically innovated nothing. But the difference is that MS-DOS jumped into an unsaturated market and took ownership of it. MS product lines of the 21st century haven't even tried to do this. They've released fixes for established apps, and Zunes (and other Borg knockoffs of what's hot yesterday). If I were an investor who intended to hold stock for a while, it wouldn't be Microsoft.
You're actually wrong. The sort of people who are upgrading computers and plasma screens (North Americans, Europeans and similar) are actually not increasing their per-capita energy use each year. They're the same people who are upgrading their insulation, light bulbs, etc.
All the increases in energy use is from the global poor, the people who are just now acquiring computers, light bulbs and cars. And I know that orthodox environmentalists disagree with me on this, because they're assholes and want the destitute to stay destitute, but I say that it is a good thing that the world's poor are using more energy. A life with any reasonable standard of living is necessarily going to involve some significant energy use, and if we want people to escape from poverty (and the non-assholes among us do), we have to welcome this.
Those of us who waste energy should cut down, but not to the point of making ourselves poor. And since that won't save nearly enough energy to allow to poor to escape poverty, what we need is a lot more energy. I would guess at least 10 terrawatts more. It's that simple. Solar will help.
Look in your spam box. Your email address has been leaked to V1agra merchants and worse, a million times over, whether you're an iPad user or not. Let's not act like these were some sort of unsoiled email addresses that have now been deflowered. There are no such things on the internet. Yeah, I don't want these jerks knowing what kind of gear I own, but in the big picture, I'd say that these people need a good spam blocker this week, and they needed it last week too.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm personally not religious, but I have no problem with people who are, as long as they don't act stupidly (being an American, this is something I see far too often). When taking a stupid position on a social issue can be observed directly to lead to a giant spike in defection, along with a corresponding giant financial loss, I think this gives the Church of Finland plenty of incentive to reconsider their social policies to keep up with social progress. Basically, they need to keep their customers happy for the money to continue to roll in. When opting out is easy, that just makes their work harder.
I have no doubt that this will be a good thing for the Finnish church in the long run, and it might be a good thing for the Christian religion altogether, because the progress that will be made by the Finns will, with time, possibly trickle into the church teachings in other countries.
There are software competitions in chess, and they're getting pretty exciting now that the software can play at a grandmaster level. I think it would be pretty cool if this sort of thing made it into games like Starcraft. In any case, I'm happy that bots and their authors are getting some prizes and recognition, because I think their work is incredibly important and fertile. Bots are out future.
Yeah, I was thinking that the dark side would make for an awesome heat sink and you could get an amazing amount of tappable heat flow from the light to the dark side. In fact, that might be one way of checking whether the planet has technological life: Is the dark side significantly warmer than it "should" be? If so, it might be because someone is exploiting the energy differential. Of course, we probably won't ever get a good enough look at this thing to be able to tell.
Look at countries with competing religions like Israel, Sudan, Iraq, etc. You're right that Civ4 made religion purely a source of contentedness and docility, but the countries I mentioned are not exactly either. That's a part of the problem with that implementation.
A part of the problem is that there wasn't a way to advance past religion. Even if you had a communistic government, your cities would keep their religions. In the real world, as civilizations advance, religions recede. I'm not sure why this didn't happen in Civ4. Also, a country full of "warring" and incompatible religions would never collapse under social strife, as happens in the real world. I mean, the Shiites and Sunnis are all Muslims, but they can't seem to be able to live in a stable country. There should be giant penalties for Civ's like this. But noo, all religion does is make your people "happy". I'm prepared to believe that a tank can be disabled by a spear-chucker, but this is ridiculous.
As a US permanent resident, I get iris scanned and fingerprinted every time I enter the US. Or at least I thought that's what it was - I'm always asked to look into some scope with my right eye. This happens every fucking time. Now there's even a separate "permanent residents" line at Terminal 4 in JFK, and wouldn't you know it, it moves at a glacial speed. BTW, this country is seriously starting to suck.
Wow, live streaming from telephones? You know what would be really awesome? If you could arrange it somehow with another person to be streaming their voice over telephone while you stream yours, and then you could both "tune in" to each others' streams. Then you could basically have a voice conversation with each other, using nothing but phones! Technology moves so fast!
I'd love for there to be some sort of automatic control system that takes measurements and makes optimal adjustments in titration, temperature, etc. I imagine that this would potentially be a cheap part with a USB plug. But even with this, who will invite people to their house for algae and crackers? And when guests ask for the bathroom, the answer is "Are you sure you don't want to just fertilize the algae? Anyway, want more crackers?"
I think that here is a case where the hippies really have it wrong. If algae is ever going to become a regular part of our diet, it will be grown in factory-scale facilities, not in aquariums that block our windows. Also, I'd like geneticists to engineer a better flavor for it than "seaweed".
Right now, Assange is just doing too much at wikileaks. If they are to fight a media war against bare-knuckled organizations that don't share their love of sunshine, they have to think more tactically. Assange is a single point of failure. He might be a rapist (I won't judge yet), and in any case, the last few weeks have proven that he is personally take-down-able. This has become far too much about him personally, and far too little about the leaks. That's why Wikileaks needs joint, distributed leadership. Should future leaders happen to "turn out to" be tax evaders, visa violators, horse thieves or child porn addicts, they get out of the way, concentrate on their defense, and leave Wikileaks in the charge of others. This is how rebellions are always organized, and it's with good reason.
On most such roads, trucks are usually also not allowed out of the left lane. Yeah, if truckers were weaving about like typical amateur drivers, you can bet that it would be pretty damn unsafe. Also, the difference between 65 and 90 is quite a bit bigger. So you're going 90 in the passing lane and a guy who wants to go 65 gets in front of you because he's passing someone going 60. That's the kind of thing that would be happening all the time.
I find the safest way to drive is to go with the flow of traffic (even if it's fast, or insane like it was in Greece when I rented a car there). But having a road where cars abide by two very different speed limits makes this impossible. The constant, awkward interaction between 65-drivers and 90-drivers would be far more dangerous than if everyone just went 90.
That's not necessarily the case. Have you ever driven on Nevada roads? You can go 90, take a brief nap, and still be perfectly safe. I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. Germany has some roads without any speed limit whatsoever, and they're safer than comparable roads elsewhere in Europe.
Seeing that Colbert is the nerdiest nerd on TV in the US, maybe you should surrender your nerd card and re-examine your priorities.
Now I can always tell myself: Hey, maybe I'm a lonely American guy (sadly true these days), but it could be soo much worse: I could be a lonely Japanese guy! Wow, that sounds depressing as hell! The saddest thing I do is... post on Slashdot, I guess! I thank the Japanese for helping me realize just how far from the rock bottom I really am!
Most people posting don't seem to acknowledge that there wouldn't be any people doing mining with five miles of water above them. This would all be done by autonomous robots. Quite honestly, I like the idea, as long as it doesn't pollute the water (I don't see why it should, if it's just the mechanical removal of stuff).
One reason why I love the idea of autonomous mining is because I want this sort of thing to happen on the moon. That ore, processed on the lunar surface, can be shot into orbit with a simple railgun and get used for whatever we want, like a permanent space station at a liberation point.
Debugging the technique in a hostile place on Earth sounds like a good idea to me.
Both of those links are very cool, thank you! In the first, I didn't like the virtual dice, and the stupid dramatic delays, but the concept seems good. I was picturing this as more of an app on touchpads that people would own for other reasons, not one giant table-sized touchpad. But then again, I can imagine that there might be some other cool apps for a table-sized touchpad, like those in your second link. Since table-sized HDTVs are becoming affordable, maybe this really is the way to go. That multitouch pong game they were playing really did look kind of fun! Still, I'd want the players and the GM to have their own screens for the character sheet, etc. There could be mounts on the central table so they don't obstruct anything.
But that's what I'm talking about. You'd be around a table with friends. It's just that your character sheet would be a touchpad. You'd roll your dice on it and it would do some of the tedious number-crunching so that you could get on with the face-to-face interaction. Also, your rulebooks would be software in the touchpad.
I thought about this quite a bit: I don't think it will be long before a major RPG system like D&D publishes an entirely paper-free edition, where the players and the DM all have touchpads. Instead of miniatures, you have avatars of your character on the game board, and certain combat actions (like determining whether a hit landed) can be automated. Basically, the "I attack this guy with my +3 sword" command would be selected on your digital character sheet, and then you just get a prompt to roll a d20 on your touchpad. All the stuff about armor adjustments, size compensation, and whatever other rules, would be calculated automatically.
I can't wait for this obvious streamlining step. I think it will most benefit rule-heavy games like Hackmaster, which are a lot more fun than D&D but rather tedious when combat situations get big. Once we get used to this, we can actually make the hit and damage modifier system even more complicated and realistic, because using weapon speed factors, armor type modifiers, armor damage, hit location determination, etc. will actually not slow down the game at all. This stuff can return the focus of the personal interaction to where it should be, which is fantasy and role-playing. As a bonus, combat rounds can be rendered and animated once this gets good enough to help with immersion.
It won't be long before the purchase of a nice touchpad will cost you less than the purchase of a set of D&D rulebooks. Then, instead of reading about character creation, it will make much more sense to just load up the character creation wizard on the touchpad and start rolling. In more advanced versions, the software will show you the first-person view of "what you see" when you kick down a door. This really is the first step.
Let me say that I really, really like this sort of a challenge. 26 Amps at 120V would definitely trip my home's circuit breaker, but it's a certainly an amount of power that's available to mere mortals. I have a feeling that we'll be surprised by all the creative ways the contestants will find to save watts. Since there is no size/clumsiness limit, I have a feeling that the cooling will be done by water pumped from a giant, passively cooling reservoir. (Well, there was a vague mention of "racks" - so maybe that won't fly.) But I genuinely wonder what sort of architecture will have the advantage here. My money is on ARM. Anyway, what's cool is that the result will be an awesome machine which could actually run in your house, and that's pretty sweet.
The nice thing about Civ4 and earlier was that the appearance of the land quickly and clearly conveyed information about what was there and its role in game terms. In an effort to make the landscape look more natural, I worry that this information might be more hidden. If so, that would be a bad decision.
Yes, thank you, this is what I thought all along - a fairly slow ship carrying lots of data (maybe millions of genomes) etched on tons of lead foil, which is wrapped up in a sphere that shields a core in which the sensitive stuff is kept. That stuff will be: reproductive cells for many humans and animals, gestation machines that can bring the eggs of fertilized mammals to term, seeds of many important plants, important microorganisms, a very fault-tolerant computer with an excellent parenting AI, and all the gear and goo needed to make it all work.
It would be a massive undertaking, but everything necessary to make it work is either already invented or it's on the technological horizon. If we don't destroy civilization in the next 200 years, we'll be able to do it. This realization, in connection with the Fermi paradox, is a little scary to me.
What Microsoft completely failed to appreciate is the need to make good mobile OSes. If Windows CE hadn't been such a pathetic afterthought, and if it had been given away for free to suffocate the rest of the market, MS would have been in a pretty good place right now. They should have been leveraging their monopoly into other markets, and they would have gotten away with it if they had even had an actively-developed product for the mobile market.
Microsoft just got complacent and lazy, because they were too accustomed to people buying their core products no matter how shitty they were. BillG knew that when they move into a new field, they actually have to win on quality. Office did this, IE4 did this, DirectX did this, but that's about the end of the list.
Apple doesn't magically create compelling products because they're a charmed company. They have to drop lots of money on designers, UI research, testing and all that stuff. None of those things are our of reach for MS. They just don't research, focus and blitz the way Apple does. Maybe the government lawsuits had something to do with it. Steve Jobs asks his board every week: Where do I want to jab my sharp elbows today? They research it and come back with a plan for new conquests. Microsoft seems to be focused on answering the complaints from their present customers. There's no vision there. Sometimes, when their lunch gets eaten, they respond with Zunes, Xboxes and Bings - also-ran products that, at best, slightly improve on the established players that they ape. Witness the recent effort to make Hotmail relevant again! It reminds me of Communist countries who thought the best response to Western temptations is to make homegrown "equivalents" for Levi's and Coca Cola. Not long after this pathetic attempt, Communism collapsed.
Apple and Google are sniffing around for unfilled needs, and designing products to fill them. Microsoft is looking at filled needs, and asking "how can we get in on this and also fill these needs?" Maybe that's in their DNA, because they got rich from an OS that basically innovated nothing. But the difference is that MS-DOS jumped into an unsaturated market and took ownership of it. MS product lines of the 21st century haven't even tried to do this. They've released fixes for established apps, and Zunes (and other Borg knockoffs of what's hot yesterday). If I were an investor who intended to hold stock for a while, it wouldn't be Microsoft.
Maybe, but Ballmer will always be the chair-man of my raging heart.
You're actually wrong. The sort of people who are upgrading computers and plasma screens (North Americans, Europeans and similar) are actually not increasing their per-capita energy use each year. They're the same people who are upgrading their insulation, light bulbs, etc.
All the increases in energy use is from the global poor, the people who are just now acquiring computers, light bulbs and cars. And I know that orthodox environmentalists disagree with me on this, because they're assholes and want the destitute to stay destitute, but I say that it is a good thing that the world's poor are using more energy. A life with any reasonable standard of living is necessarily going to involve some significant energy use, and if we want people to escape from poverty (and the non-assholes among us do), we have to welcome this.
Those of us who waste energy should cut down, but not to the point of making ourselves poor. And since that won't save nearly enough energy to allow to poor to escape poverty, what we need is a lot more energy. I would guess at least 10 terrawatts more. It's that simple. Solar will help.
Look in your spam box. Your email address has been leaked to V1agra merchants and worse, a million times over, whether you're an iPad user or not. Let's not act like these were some sort of unsoiled email addresses that have now been deflowered. There are no such things on the internet. Yeah, I don't want these jerks knowing what kind of gear I own, but in the big picture, I'd say that these people need a good spam blocker this week, and they needed it last week too.