Since the laptop already has built in wireless, put it in your living room, ditch your router and plug this straight into your modem. The advantage is that you can run your torrents and ed2k with no interruption and minimal energy use, and also play all the video/audio on your network on your living room entertainment system. If the machine is powerful enough, it can easily do all these things.
This is dumb. I mean, every house already has a running device with an ARM processor: their router! It would be so much more logical if torrents ran on the router than on a PC. For one thing, the router could throttle back the torrent if computers on the network were asking for data, and it could upload full bore when everyone is asleep.
Before you post links to routers with a USB port and a shoddy torrent client: I know about these, and it's a step in the right direction, but the interface needs to be much better. I should click on a torrent file on my bedroom computer and have that torrent be loaded into my router.
I like the idea that this thing accepts SD flash cards. Pretty soon, 8GB will be trivially cheap, and that could serve as cache. Periodically, as the cache fills up, the router could wake up a computer, transfer finished files to it and put it back to sleep. This wouldn't be hard - any proper geek could write a script to do this.
It's pretty quick when I put it on my portable hard drive, which has many other functions besides transporting lots of data. I don't think it's all that common that people need to regularly transfer 250 GB of data across town, but we already have cheap ways of doing this. What's more, this won't cost us a $50 disk plus some $500 burner. Hell, for $50, you can already buy a 250GB portable hard drive!
I don't like the precedent set here. It's like we're failing to distinguish between what is harmful and what we find in bad taste. Cigarettes are harmful. The studies are conclusive. Is there any evidence that games are?
Every ISP in the world has bandwidth caps. They just set them at different rates. But that's not the issue with Time Warner. You can be forgiven for not caring since you're in Europe, but the issue is data caps plus massive "overuse" charges when you exceed those caps.
I can't think of a single ISP in the Czech Republic that has data caps. A few years ago they did, but genuine competition wiped them out. In other words, progress happened. What Time Warner is doing is the exact opposite of progress. Maybe it's my European roots, but I would love to see them spend some time under the heel of the government's boot until they start acting in the interest of America's future. This is the time when we need to learn again how to lead the world in technology. When Americans are forced to take the short bus to the internet, that's really fucking unpatriotic.
I'd be happiest if the job of maintaining a filter list were more widely distributed now. Maybe the next version of Adblock+ should have a menu item that not only lets you add custom filters to block things, but you also get a "this object is an ad" option. Selecting it would update a database somewhere on Sourceforge or whatever. Then list developers could comb through the reports and quickly verify which are ads.
This would leave most of the discovery of unlisted ads to the users of the internet, while not putting any sort of extraordinary burden on them (two clicks).
But don't you think it would be better to stimulate our economy by building water treatment plants where they are needed, training thousands of talented people from poor countries to be doctors, bringing electricity to environmentally sensitive regions so that people don't need to cut down rainforests for firewood, making sure that all young children get enough nutrition for their brains to fully develop, preventing deaths from malaria, etc? All of these things would require work and so create many thousands of jobs.
It's not fair to pretend that if we put 150 billion into projects like these, that wouldn't stimulate our economy. It definitely would. But it would also do a whole lot of good in the world, much more good than a six year delay in global warming. So I think the true humanists should be more focused on hiring park rangers to protect endangered elephants, gorillas and tigers from poachers. If we're scared for the polar bears, let's first stop shooting them! It's much cheaper and more effective. And for fuck's sake, let's keep children from dying of diarrhea!
And as far as innovation, I think we will get much more innovation per dollar if we make a commitment to educate every boy and girl in the third world. That's where the inventions of the future will come from.
Compared to worthy goals like this, Al Gore's rapid and expensive retooling of our energy industry really does look like a bad bang for the buck in every way.
I know that projections with big numbers are always a bit sketchy. My point is that there are positive externalities to both spending big on green technology, and spending big on sanitation, education, wilderness protection, etc. I can't think of a good reason why in the long run, one is a better economic investment than the other. But I think there is a huge moral difference between these two spending strategies, so I can't possibly endorse Al Gore's priorities.
Regarding non-human lifeforms, Lomborg thinks that resources should be focused on preserving habitats and preventing extinctions. Both of these are many orders of magnitude cheaper that a rushed retooling of our entire energy industry, and they are being ignored. And here I agree.
I don't remember him addressing overpopulation, but here's what I'd say about that: human depopulation is far more likely than overpopulation. Look here for the authoritative talk on the subject, by Philip Longman. (mp3 and ogg of the talk)
Gee, really? Thank you, on my home planet we don't have these so-called Abbotts and Costellos. Your willingness to explain the obvious to a traveler like me will be noted in my logs.
I agree, nobody gets special deference in these questions, especially not people who aren't climate scientists - which includes Freeman Dyson, Vaclav Klaus and Al Gore.
But I think that there is a related debate about our priorities which we should all be having: The debate about the best way to use our resources to make a better future. At this point, I think it's fair to assume that there will be some global warming in the next 100 years. My answer to what we should do about it is basically articulated here.
Much of that cost will be paid by other people than the ones doing the damage.
So let me guess: Your remedy for this is to have the industrialized countries take out a loan and buy up acres of solar panels. Yes, your children will thank you, because now it won't be 1.5 degrees warmer as they perform their indentured service.
Whether global global warming really is a problem or not, you need to take it seriously and try to pollute as little as possible, because it's moronic to gamble with this one ecosystem we have.
First of all, I agree that most "skeptics" are either stupid or bought. I'm ashamed that my president, Vaclav Klaus, is as stupid as he is.
I also think that we should do every easy thing we can do to not pollute. But that's not what Gore is for. Gore wants to embark on a program that's so dramatic and expensive that it will basically leave us no resources to do anything else meaningful.
If you're curious why I think that's wrong, inhumane and illiberal, I can't say it better than Bjorn Lomborg.
I agree that the "debunker" movement is mainly composed of shills and idiots. Vaclav Klaus, my president, is one of the idiots. The "global cooling scientists" are paid shills.
Freeman Dyson is neither. Bjorn Lomborg is neither. You shouldn't judge them by the company they keep.
Thank you for digging this up. I don't want to get mixed up in the he said/she said dispute about whether Gore said "science was not going to intrude on public policy."
I think it's fair to ask, though, whether Gore acts as though he's not prepared to let science intrude on public policy. I happen to think he does, and I think that gives some corroboration to Happer's story. But whatever. Just because Gore wants you to shut off your brain doesn't mean you should.
Maybe I'm just too liberal for Gore, but I think that Bjorn Lomborg is absolutely right in this debate. Take 15 minutes to see where he's coming from:
Gah, can't we count on people to know things anymore? If you don't know that Dyson is a great thinker who has done great science, that's your fault. If you're older than 15, you have no excuse for not knowing that.
You also seem to be unaware that the internet has sources for every piece of idiocy, so providing sources doesn't settle anything. The sources need to be evaluated by people who know stuff. The existence of Google and Wikis doesn't relieve you of that burden.
if we follow the consensus and it turns out they're wrong, the consequences of that are what?
The consequences are the same as the downside of any sort of fanaticism. Even if that goal is good, it crowds out all other goals, including better and cheaper ones.
In a world where so many people don't even have clean water and basic medicine, isn't it a bit vain for rich people to ignore their problems and invest trillions (which is what it will cost) to fight the CO2 dragon that might not bite, and if it does, it will force us to build bigger dikes and levies?
Please watch this, and come back if you have a reason to disagree with it.
Exactly. I mean, I can understand not wanting personally to be killed, but let's say that the AI just sterilized all human beings, so that nobody gets killed in the process of our species being extinguished. Would that really be so bad? I imagine the AI would take the good stuff that we have come up with and just not emulate the bad stuff we do, and the world would be a better place all around.
I would prefer this to the alternative, in which the AI keeps a few humans in some sort of zoo, because they're queasy about species extinction.
Also, it's a freaking toilet that allegedly makes your waste products "drinkable" again. "Serenity" is like a heavy-handed way of imposing denial about this from the PR department. In comparison, "Colbert" is just fun.
That actually sounds pretty cool. A friend of mine developed game system called "pulp in a cup" and I was there when he first ran it at a gaming con. I was really impressed!
We had four hours to play a complete scenario. He described the world and the mission (in that case Japanese cyberpunk, but any setting would work) and asked the players to describe their characters, their special powers, backgrounds, etc. So character generation took about 10 minutes, involved no paper, and it was interesting. Then we'd ask questions to get a better understanding of the situation, and try to just accomplish the task. I was amazed at how well that worked! We were just able to immerse in the story and not fiddle with any mechanics. I wish John would publish the (very short) outline of instructions for how to run the system. So far, this is the only mention I found.
No, don't picture this like the Mob. Think of it more like a big Hezbollah, who already perform many municipal services in places ravaged by combat or neglected by the state.
As was the case in the 35mm film days, the cameras that are best are the ones with the good lenses and good auto focus mechanisms. Secondary are good light meters. The pixel density is definitely high enough at 12M. At the start of digital photography, the CCD was definitely the primary bottleneck for picture quality. But those days are definitively over.
I think there were even a few things that were actually added into 3e that weren't in 2e, that indeed made it easier to just "roll-play" what in 2e was an entirely social encounter.
Yeah. And you know, people like me preferred it that way. This social element made it much more fun to be a DM. I had a good idea of how difficult anything should be, so before there were skills and feats, players could still attempt them. They'd explain to me why they think they might have a reasonable chance to succeed, I considered their case in the context of the world that I created, and it was easy to work out the probability that they would succeed. I would communicate this to them in qualitiative terms. ("You have a pretty slim chance of landing on that ledge if you jump from standstill, unless you take off that huge backpack.") Then if they want to do it, I tell them to grab a d20 and hope to roll high.
See, there was once a time when DMs weren't so chickenshit that they had to hide behind tables for everything. Yes, it's good to have clear rules about the basic stuff, like falling damage (and also combat, obviously).
DMs now are designed explicitly so that a computer can play their role almost as well as they can. This is not only boring for the DM, it removes many of the interesting role-playing options from the players. Those options just "do not compute."
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Since the laptop already has built in wireless, put it in your living room, ditch your router and plug this straight into your modem. The advantage is that you can run your torrents and ed2k with no interruption and minimal energy use, and also play all the video/audio on your network on your living room entertainment system. If the machine is powerful enough, it can easily do all these things.
Or, give it to me, and I'll do this!
This is dumb. I mean, every house already has a running device with an ARM processor: their router! It would be so much more logical if torrents ran on the router than on a PC. For one thing, the router could throttle back the torrent if computers on the network were asking for data, and it could upload full bore when everyone is asleep.
Before you post links to routers with a USB port and a shoddy torrent client: I know about these, and it's a step in the right direction, but the interface needs to be much better. I should click on a torrent file on my bedroom computer and have that torrent be loaded into my router.
I like the idea that this thing accepts SD flash cards. Pretty soon, 8GB will be trivially cheap, and that could serve as cache. Periodically, as the cache fills up, the router could wake up a computer, transfer finished files to it and put it back to sleep. This wouldn't be hard - any proper geek could write a script to do this.
It's pretty quick when I put it on my portable hard drive, which has many other functions besides transporting lots of data. I don't think it's all that common that people need to regularly transfer 250 GB of data across town, but we already have cheap ways of doing this. What's more, this won't cost us a $50 disk plus some $500 burner. Hell, for $50, you can already buy a 250GB portable hard drive!
I don't like the precedent set here. It's like we're failing to distinguish between what is harmful and what we find in bad taste. Cigarettes are harmful. The studies are conclusive. Is there any evidence that games are?
Every ISP in the world has bandwidth caps. They just set them at different rates. But that's not the issue with Time Warner. You can be forgiven for not caring since you're in Europe, but the issue is data caps plus massive "overuse" charges when you exceed those caps.
I can't think of a single ISP in the Czech Republic that has data caps. A few years ago they did, but genuine competition wiped them out. In other words, progress happened. What Time Warner is doing is the exact opposite of progress. Maybe it's my European roots, but I would love to see them spend some time under the heel of the government's boot until they start acting in the interest of America's future. This is the time when we need to learn again how to lead the world in technology. When Americans are forced to take the short bus to the internet, that's really fucking unpatriotic.
I'd be happiest if the job of maintaining a filter list were more widely distributed now. Maybe the next version of Adblock+ should have a menu item that not only lets you add custom filters to block things, but you also get a "this object is an ad" option. Selecting it would update a database somewhere on Sourceforge or whatever. Then list developers could comb through the reports and quickly verify which are ads.
This would leave most of the discovery of unlisted ads to the users of the internet, while not putting any sort of extraordinary burden on them (two clicks).
But don't you think it would be better to stimulate our economy by building water treatment plants where they are needed, training thousands of talented people from poor countries to be doctors, bringing electricity to environmentally sensitive regions so that people don't need to cut down rainforests for firewood, making sure that all young children get enough nutrition for their brains to fully develop, preventing deaths from malaria, etc? All of these things would require work and so create many thousands of jobs.
It's not fair to pretend that if we put 150 billion into projects like these, that wouldn't stimulate our economy. It definitely would. But it would also do a whole lot of good in the world, much more good than a six year delay in global warming. So I think the true humanists should be more focused on hiring park rangers to protect endangered elephants, gorillas and tigers from poachers. If we're scared for the polar bears, let's first stop shooting them! It's much cheaper and more effective. And for fuck's sake, let's keep children from dying of diarrhea!
And as far as innovation, I think we will get much more innovation per dollar if we make a commitment to educate every boy and girl in the third world. That's where the inventions of the future will come from.
Compared to worthy goals like this, Al Gore's rapid and expensive retooling of our energy industry really does look like a bad bang for the buck in every way.
I know that projections with big numbers are always a bit sketchy. My point is that there are positive externalities to both spending big on green technology, and spending big on sanitation, education, wilderness protection, etc. I can't think of a good reason why in the long run, one is a better economic investment than the other. But I think there is a huge moral difference between these two spending strategies, so I can't possibly endorse Al Gore's priorities.
Regarding non-human lifeforms, Lomborg thinks that resources should be focused on preserving habitats and preventing extinctions. Both of these are many orders of magnitude cheaper that a rushed retooling of our entire energy industry, and they are being ignored. And here I agree.
I don't remember him addressing overpopulation, but here's what I'd say about that: human depopulation is far more likely than overpopulation. Look here for the authoritative talk on the subject, by Philip Longman. (mp3 and ogg of the talk)
Gee, really? Thank you, on my home planet we don't have these so-called Abbotts and Costellos. Your willingness to explain the obvious to a traveler like me will be noted in my logs.
But I think that there is a related debate about our priorities which we should all be having: The debate about the best way to use our resources to make a better future. At this point, I think it's fair to assume that there will be some global warming in the next 100 years. My answer to what we should do about it is basically articulated here.
Much of that cost will be paid by other people than the ones doing the damage.
So let me guess: Your remedy for this is to have the industrialized countries take out a loan and buy up acres of solar panels. Yes, your children will thank you, because now it won't be 1.5 degrees warmer as they perform their indentured service.
Whether global global warming really is a problem or not, you need to take it seriously and try to pollute as little as possible, because it's moronic to gamble with this one ecosystem we have.
First of all, I agree that most "skeptics" are either stupid or bought. I'm ashamed that my president, Vaclav Klaus, is as stupid as he is.
I also think that we should do every easy thing we can do to not pollute. But that's not what Gore is for. Gore wants to embark on a program that's so dramatic and expensive that it will basically leave us no resources to do anything else meaningful.
If you're curious why I think that's wrong, inhumane and illiberal, I can't say it better than Bjorn Lomborg.
Al Gore is a politician, which guarantees that he has no ulterior motives. Get with the times!
Freeman Dyson is neither. Bjorn Lomborg is neither. You shouldn't judge them by the company they keep.
Thank you for digging this up. I don't want to get mixed up in the he said/she said dispute about whether Gore said "science was not going to intrude on public policy."
I think it's fair to ask, though, whether Gore acts as though he's not prepared to let science intrude on public policy. I happen to think he does, and I think that gives some corroboration to Happer's story. But whatever. Just because Gore wants you to shut off your brain doesn't mean you should.
Maybe I'm just too liberal for Gore, but I think that Bjorn Lomborg is absolutely right in this debate. Take 15 minutes to see where he's coming from:
Bjorn Lomborg talk on TED
Again, a source would be nice. (ad inf)
Gah, can't we count on people to know things anymore? If you don't know that Dyson is a great thinker who has done great science, that's your fault. If you're older than 15, you have no excuse for not knowing that.
You also seem to be unaware that the internet has sources for every piece of idiocy, so providing sources doesn't settle anything. The sources need to be evaluated by people who know stuff. The existence of Google and Wikis doesn't relieve you of that burden.
if we follow the consensus and it turns out they're wrong, the consequences of that are what?
The consequences are the same as the downside of any sort of fanaticism. Even if that goal is good, it crowds out all other goals, including better and cheaper ones.
In a world where so many people don't even have clean water and basic medicine, isn't it a bit vain for rich people to ignore their problems and invest trillions (which is what it will cost) to fight the CO2 dragon that might not bite, and if it does, it will force us to build bigger dikes and levies?
Please watch this, and come back if you have a reason to disagree with it.
Whats the problem?
Exactly. I mean, I can understand not wanting personally to be killed, but let's say that the AI just sterilized all human beings, so that nobody gets killed in the process of our species being extinguished. Would that really be so bad? I imagine the AI would take the good stuff that we have come up with and just not emulate the bad stuff we do, and the world would be a better place all around.
I would prefer this to the alternative, in which the AI keeps a few humans in some sort of zoo, because they're queasy about species extinction.
That deserves a "Funny" tag!
Also, it's a freaking toilet that allegedly makes your waste products "drinkable" again. "Serenity" is like a heavy-handed way of imposing denial about this from the PR department. In comparison, "Colbert" is just fun.
That actually sounds pretty cool. A friend of mine developed game system called "pulp in a cup" and I was there when he first ran it at a gaming con. I was really impressed!
We had four hours to play a complete scenario. He described the world and the mission (in that case Japanese cyberpunk, but any setting would work) and asked the players to describe their characters, their special powers, backgrounds, etc. So character generation took about 10 minutes, involved no paper, and it was interesting. Then we'd ask questions to get a better understanding of the situation, and try to just accomplish the task. I was amazed at how well that worked! We were just able to immerse in the story and not fiddle with any mechanics. I wish John would publish the (very short) outline of instructions for how to run the system. So far, this is the only mention I found.
No, don't picture this like the Mob. Think of it more like a big Hezbollah, who already perform many municipal services in places ravaged by combat or neglected by the state.
As was the case in the 35mm film days, the cameras that are best are the ones with the good lenses and good auto focus mechanisms. Secondary are good light meters. The pixel density is definitely high enough at 12M. At the start of digital photography, the CCD was definitely the primary bottleneck for picture quality. But those days are definitively over.
I think there were even a few things that were actually added into 3e that weren't in 2e, that indeed made it easier to just "roll-play" what in 2e was an entirely social encounter.
Yeah. And you know, people like me preferred it that way. This social element made it much more fun to be a DM. I had a good idea of how difficult anything should be, so before there were skills and feats, players could still attempt them. They'd explain to me why they think they might have a reasonable chance to succeed, I considered their case in the context of the world that I created, and it was easy to work out the probability that they would succeed. I would communicate this to them in qualitiative terms. ("You have a pretty slim chance of landing on that ledge if you jump from standstill, unless you take off that huge backpack.") Then if they want to do it, I tell them to grab a d20 and hope to roll high.
See, there was once a time when DMs weren't so chickenshit that they had to hide behind tables for everything. Yes, it's good to have clear rules about the basic stuff, like falling damage (and also combat, obviously).
DMs now are designed explicitly so that a computer can play their role almost as well as they can. This is not only boring for the DM, it removes many of the interesting role-playing options from the players. Those options just "do not compute."
Did this inconsistency really get in your way once you spent the necessary 30 seconds to learn that on saving throws, you want to roll low?