Did they make it in Area 51, where the moon landings were staged? It makes sense!
Only one small problem with your theory: How do the Illuminati fit in with this, and what about Kennedy? Until you resolve these two gaps in your theory, I'm afraid I won't be able to give it my full credence.
SPSS has now become the standard data analysis package for quantitative studies in social sciences. It's very crappy software, and it wouldn't take a whole lot of augmentation to get Excel do what SPSS does.
The problem is that social scientists don't want to mess with the internals too much, and SPSS made for them a point and click interface - in effect, they out-Microsofted Microsoft. They charge an insulting $1500/copy and completely dominate the universities, so they're making good money.
First caveat: It's dumb to count transmission loss. Since this tower removes CO2 from the atmosphere, which is everywhere on our planet's surface, these scrubbers would obviously be built right by the powerplant.
Second caveat: The ideal place for these things would be a place with lots of cheap, clean power and not much demand for that power. Iceland would be perfect: They have more geothermal power than they know what to do with. They could use it to scrub the whole planet's atmosphere and collect UN money for the service.
But that's small potatoes. What I'm rather picturing is something much grander, something like giant colonies of nuclear reactors somewhere in Greenland, where they wouldn't endanger anyone, and the cooling towers would be much simpler to build because it's damn cold there already. Their sole purpose would be to scrub carbon out of our atmosphere. I think it would be great.
If it was a smart 5th grader, Palin would still probably lose, but at least it would be a whole lot more fair and entertaining than the stuff we'll have to watch.
They just pulled the plug on usenet on June 23, 2008. Though I've been reasonably happy with my service, this really pissed me off.
It's not like I have less access to stuff. Now though, instead of downloading DVD images from locally-run servers, I'll be making Time Warner pay bandwidth fees all the bits I want. This really doesn't help their balance sheets at all.
I totally agree. I think Google should offer the same child care stipend whether or not you have your child in Google daycare or some private daycare run by a third party. If you can show that your child is enrolled in one of these, you should get the same "daycare credit." Rich people can use Google's "high end" service if they choose. That would be the fair way to resolve the issue.
Honestly, I'm amazed at how much daycare costs for one child. How is it possible that cheaper alternatives don't elbow into that market? On the other hand, Google daycare must be some sort of paradise for kids.
I've thought about this myself and came to exactly the same conclusion. I'd put the matter only a little differently: The question is: When will we write AI that can do all the work of a competent human game content developer? I expect it will take a while, but not forever.
Surely, there will initially be some cheating. So maybe when you kill an orc, it will indeed stay dead, but another orc will spawn elsewhere in the forest, waiting to be found by another adventurer. I would love it if we tried to simulate an actual ecosystem that simulated (among other things) the conception, birth, feeding, etc. of orcs, but that would have three problems. One: It's just asking too much of the AI. Two: It would reveal how ecologically incoherent most of the classic "dungeons" in rpg's really are (even by standards of fictional ecology, orcs must consume so many calories each day, shit somewhere, etc. They're not going to be having lives in some single room in a dungeon.) Three: Such a system, even if it were relatively stable without PC interference, could easily be corrupted hopelessly by the actions of some powerful player characters. Destroying is much better suited to the activity of a PC in a CRPG than is building. Destroying is faster. Cutting down a tree is much easier than making one grow.
All current and future CRPGs must find a way to set back up the knocked-down bowling pins, or set up different bowling pins instead. If a group is bent on deforestation or depopulation of a country, and the game must replace what is killed in a natural way, there will soon be no more trees nor NPC humans.
Of course, systems could be introduced that prevent such actions. Repairer druids might magically regrow lost forests, but who will generate replacement villagers?
What's attractive about "adventure settings" is that they are in a context of very weak central institutions (so they leave space for adventure) with potentially powerful individuals. There are no "adventurers" in Singapore, because there, even spitting on the CCTV-watched street gets you in trouble. That's one way to prevent chaotic rampagers, but the four classic role-playing world types (middle-age w. spells, western, war & post-apocalyptic) are not chosen by accident. They're settings where individuals are not under the yoke of a central authority. For fans of Firefly: The protagonist adventure-group does their work on the outer planets exactly because central control doesn't extend that far.
My point is that it wouldn't be an adventure game if it were in a setting that prevented individuals from devastating rampaging. This means that such settings are inherently unstable. (Usually, strong governments elbow in and stamp out the "adventure space" - for the most part.)
So even a perfect AI would not be able to impose stability on an inherently unstable, fully simulated situation. Adventure settings are paradigmatically not in equilibrium.
Blizzard absolutely have a right to control what happens on their servers. Notice though that this injunction is not about their servers. It's about what code is released on the internet - which Blizzard doesn't own.
It's within their right to say "you can't use that code on our servers" - and they have a right to enforce that rule however they please (delete violating accounts or whatever). However, it's clearly not within their right to say "you can't use that code anywhere, or even have it, or even look at it."
Worst yet is the "puzzles" that require me to follow a script that even an NPC would find degrading and the entire puzzle is figuring out and enacting the lame script the some 4th rate "autuer" has contrived.
Yes, and all the explicit puzzles in games are of this variety. Games have bad writers to begin with, and when you tell bad writers to aim at the lowest common denominator of their expected audience, you get shit.
My favorite puzzles flow naturally from a difficult game: How do I organize my defenses to repel an attack from a superior force; what combination of spells can I use to kill a dragon without being fried, etc. If you ask a game writer to explicitly compose a puzzle you're asking for garbage, and you will certainly get it.
I'm for all plausible technologies for generating electricity which don't emit CO2. I think there's hope for large wind and solar-thermal generating grids, but these will come online too slowly and still cost too much.
That's why I'm convinced that we'll be burning coal till my death unless we also supplement these with a big deployment of nuclear. I'm also a leftist-environmentalist, but I really feel betrayed by Gore.
I wonder how hard and useful it would be to merge these photos into Google Sky. They probably don't have exact coordinate info... or do they?... and maybe Google already has deeper pictures, but wow, if all Hubble photos could be stitched together and made available with such a great interface, that would be awesome.
In fact, as with France's fuel cycle, the DOE plan is hard to defend unless several such breeder reactors are built. Without them, high-level transuranic waste would become a growing annoyance in the United States, much like the MOX bundles building up in La Hague's cooling ponds. Burton Richter, a Nobel laureate who leads the DOE's science panel on nuclear waste separations (and also serves on the board of Areva Enterprises), acknowledges that breeder reactors are DOE's endgame. "Everybody is in agreement that the right system ultimately results in multiple recycles in fast [breeder] Âreactors, so that's where things are going," Richter says.
OK, that was a good read, and it made me rather optimistic that the American DOE ultimately agrees with France that full fast breeder reactors are the future of nuclear power. But they're also scary, and there needs to be a lot of research before we start building them on a large scale, so I am a strong advocate for starting now.
If this thing could be configured as a router, it would be incredibly awesome. Not only would it be far more configurable than the basic router, but it could also be the only computing device in my house that would have to stay on 24/7.
This is because, in addition to router/access-point functions, it could run Bittorrent and ed2k servers in the background, as well as an FTP server and a simple web server for my personal use. This way, I could remotely Wake-On-Lan any computer in my home from anywhere in the world, and transfer files. Right now, because I like using my nighttime bandwidth for uploading to Bittorrent, I leave on a 100+ watt computer all the time. This is very inefficient, and I'd love to offload that function on a 2 watt router device.
I know we've been promised OLED displays, but if solid-state blue LEDs are going to be cheap, I want them to make a screen from them. (I know green and red are absurdly cheap; the blue ones were holding this back.) I'm sure they could make them much smaller, but suppose you had a 3-diode pixel that was 5mm across. A high-definition display made from these would be almost ten meters wide, which would be awesome in movie theater, a stadium or an outdoor display. Plus, it should be pretty simple to yank out and replace any pixel that burns out. These would be incredibly power-efficient, because they would use no power at all to display black. Basically, you could use them for super-efficient, programmable room lighting as well - and how cool would that be?
There is no reason to make waste that's dangerous for 10,000 years. In advanced countries like France, which has the cleanest air and the cheapest power in Europe, the waste from its many reactors is separated and the heavy atoms (which are responsible for almost all long-term radioactivity of unprocessed waste) are fissile and are used to make more electricity.
They thought about making dumping sites for what remains (and it's far less dangerous than the 10,000-year figure), but nobody liked that, so the waste is stored at the plant itself waiting to be used for something in the future.
I'm pretty sure that we'll need that stuff for something, and it will be a pain to dig it up.
With proper reprocessing, reactor waste can be made less radioactive than the mined ore in a span of 300 years, so nuclear power could potentially reduce the radioactivity in the world.
I was given an old P3-600 Sony laptop with a dead battery. Turns out it only needed a new disk, and it badly needed to get rid of Windows ME.
Because of the dead battery (which is too expensive to replace), it's important that I get quick boot times, and XP hibernation is the answer. I can go from unplugged/unpowered to full desktop in six seconds. One reason why it's so fast is because it only had 256MB of ram, so the memory image loads fast. I love it.
Because of this positive experience with XP, i decided to load it up on my living room networked media PC (also gifted). It runs on a very inefficient P4 Celeron, so it shouldn't be left on. However, it's also sometimes needed as an FTP server, in case I need to retrieve some files from work. Luckily, XP hibernate is fully compatible with Wake-on-Lan. This means that all I need to do is to send a magic packet from work to my server and bedroom computer, wait a few seconds, and then everything works. The trickier part is remotely turning putting them back on hibernate, for which I use TightVNC.
The truth is, Dr. Hawking has reached the retireable age of 66 and though he's still very lucid, it's customary for universities to shell out the big bucks for professors who are in their prime. Statistically, it's pretty unlikely that Dr. Hawking has a whole lot of great ideas left in him. The physics work for which he's famous was in the 60's and 70's. Plus, it's kind of in bad taste to think of him as a trophy - not that all US universities lack bad taste.
Anyway, I think this open speculation has more to do with trying to shake down the British government for a bit of extra research money, to avoid the UK's embarrassment of losing their most prominent homegrown talent, who occupies Newton's old chair. And that's probably the greatest thing that Dr. Hawking can do for physics now: Bring in money, increase awareness and generate press.
If you read the thread you were replying to, you'd see that the very topic of debate is about how circumstances are correlated with opportunity to display one's brilliance. So cities with more inventors etc. could be (and almost certainly are) a sign of a certain cultural and economic climate which encourages it. Maybe all the goatherds of Albania are as smart as Newton. How would we notice? Maybe Newton would have been a very average goatherd, or worse. That was the point!
But if we accept your shoddy evidence, you'll also have to admit that cities had spurts of brilliance at specific times - Athens in 400BC, Copenhagen in the late 20s, Vienna around 1900, etc. Would you suggest that the cities smartened up or dumbed down on a time scale of one generation? Or is it rather that the social circumstances changed while the intellectual talent of the people stayed the same? Of course there are brain drains throughout history, but that doesn't explain any of the examples I gave.
I don't know how your comment got modded up. Your remark about agrarian countries lacking brilliant people is totally reprehensible - and stupid. Yes, you're stupid.
This post was far more informative and useful than TFA. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. You're more of a power user than I am (I wouldn't know how to hack an.msi file to not do version checks, for example), and if you had this sort of trouble, I would have my hair ripped out!
We report single- and tandem-waveguide organic solar concentrators with quantum efficiencies exceeding 50% and projected power conversion efficiencies as high as 6.8%.
So when photovoltaics say they're 35% efficient, does that mean power conversion efficiency? Or is it this quantum efficiency, which seems somehow less relevant than, you know, the amount of power that the cell can produce?
I wouldn't want streetcars to be rolling through suburbs. I'm in Europe visiting my parents, and a streetcar comes down our street (six floors below). It's surprising how loud it is, even up here. I can only imagine how it would sound through the paper-thin walls of those American wooden houses!
I think that some sort of an electric bus would make a whole lot more sense. It could use efficient but slow charging batteries which could be swapped out for charging at the depot two or three times each day. That sounds cumbersome but would require far less infrastructure than overhead wiring, etc.
I like how things are here in Europe, but the US can't be aping the Europeans (or their former selves) in the 21st century. Hell, in our suburbs our power, phone and cable still run from overground wooden poles and drape across the street. Imagine a tram on a street like that.
I don't think that's the ideal. There's a lot of duplicated effort, since we'd need both a grid and individual generators. That's lots of non-experts climbing on their roofs with wrenches to fix their panels, other extra maintenance, etc.
I think the ideal power source is an underground wire going to your house, with all the electrons you need, and that costs you very little. Fusion power would be just like that: Massive, industrial, pointless on a small scale, and awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
The Congo really is pretty far from Eastern Siberia.
Did they make it in Area 51, where the moon landings were staged? It makes sense!
Only one small problem with your theory: How do the Illuminati fit in with this, and what about Kennedy? Until you resolve these two gaps in your theory, I'm afraid I won't be able to give it my full credence.
SPSS has now become the standard data analysis package for quantitative studies in social sciences. It's very crappy software, and it wouldn't take a whole lot of augmentation to get Excel do what SPSS does.
The problem is that social scientists don't want to mess with the internals too much, and SPSS made for them a point and click interface - in effect, they out-Microsofted Microsoft. They charge an insulting $1500/copy and completely dominate the universities, so they're making good money.
They seriously need some competition.
First caveat: It's dumb to count transmission loss. Since this tower removes CO2 from the atmosphere, which is everywhere on our planet's surface, these scrubbers would obviously be built right by the powerplant.
Second caveat: The ideal place for these things would be a place with lots of cheap, clean power and not much demand for that power. Iceland would be perfect: They have more geothermal power than they know what to do with. They could use it to scrub the whole planet's atmosphere and collect UN money for the service.
But that's small potatoes. What I'm rather picturing is something much grander, something like giant colonies of nuclear reactors somewhere in Greenland, where they wouldn't endanger anyone, and the cooling towers would be much simpler to build because it's damn cold there already. Their sole purpose would be to scrub carbon out of our atmosphere. I think it would be great.
If it was a smart 5th grader, Palin would still probably lose, but at least it would be a whole lot more fair and entertaining than the stuff we'll have to watch.
They just pulled the plug on usenet on June 23, 2008. Though I've been reasonably happy with my service, this really pissed me off.
It's not like I have less access to stuff. Now though, instead of downloading DVD images from locally-run servers, I'll be making Time Warner pay bandwidth fees all the bits I want. This really doesn't help their balance sheets at all.
I totally agree. I think Google should offer the same child care stipend whether or not you have your child in Google daycare or some private daycare run by a third party. If you can show that your child is enrolled in one of these, you should get the same "daycare credit." Rich people can use Google's "high end" service if they choose. That would be the fair way to resolve the issue.
Honestly, I'm amazed at how much daycare costs for one child. How is it possible that cheaper alternatives don't elbow into that market? On the other hand, Google daycare must be some sort of paradise for kids.
Good post!
I've thought about this myself and came to exactly the same conclusion. I'd put the matter only a little differently: The question is: When will we write AI that can do all the work of a competent human game content developer? I expect it will take a while, but not forever.
Surely, there will initially be some cheating. So maybe when you kill an orc, it will indeed stay dead, but another orc will spawn elsewhere in the forest, waiting to be found by another adventurer. I would love it if we tried to simulate an actual ecosystem that simulated (among other things) the conception, birth, feeding, etc. of orcs, but that would have three problems. One: It's just asking too much of the AI. Two: It would reveal how ecologically incoherent most of the classic "dungeons" in rpg's really are (even by standards of fictional ecology, orcs must consume so many calories each day, shit somewhere, etc. They're not going to be having lives in some single room in a dungeon.) Three: Such a system, even if it were relatively stable without PC interference, could easily be corrupted hopelessly by the actions of some powerful player characters. Destroying is much better suited to the activity of a PC in a CRPG than is building. Destroying is faster. Cutting down a tree is much easier than making one grow.
All current and future CRPGs must find a way to set back up the knocked-down bowling pins, or set up different bowling pins instead. If a group is bent on deforestation or depopulation of a country, and the game must replace what is killed in a natural way, there will soon be no more trees nor NPC humans.
Of course, systems could be introduced that prevent such actions. Repairer druids might magically regrow lost forests, but who will generate replacement villagers?
What's attractive about "adventure settings" is that they are in a context of very weak central institutions (so they leave space for adventure) with potentially powerful individuals. There are no "adventurers" in Singapore, because there, even spitting on the CCTV-watched street gets you in trouble. That's one way to prevent chaotic rampagers, but the four classic role-playing world types (middle-age w. spells, western, war & post-apocalyptic) are not chosen by accident. They're settings where individuals are not under the yoke of a central authority. For fans of Firefly: The protagonist adventure-group does their work on the outer planets exactly because central control doesn't extend that far.
My point is that it wouldn't be an adventure game if it were in a setting that prevented individuals from devastating rampaging. This means that such settings are inherently unstable. (Usually, strong governments elbow in and stamp out the "adventure space" - for the most part.)
So even a perfect AI would not be able to impose stability on an inherently unstable, fully simulated situation. Adventure settings are paradigmatically not in equilibrium.
You can get surprisingly far by selling sports cars, if you do it well.
Blizzard absolutely have a right to control what happens on their servers. Notice though that this injunction is not about their servers. It's about what code is released on the internet - which Blizzard doesn't own.
It's within their right to say "you can't use that code on our servers" - and they have a right to enforce that rule however they please (delete violating accounts or whatever). However, it's clearly not within their right to say "you can't use that code anywhere, or even have it, or even look at it."
Worst yet is the "puzzles" that require me to follow a script that even an NPC would find degrading and the entire puzzle is figuring out and enacting the lame script the some 4th rate "autuer" has contrived.
Yes, and all the explicit puzzles in games are of this variety. Games have bad writers to begin with, and when you tell bad writers to aim at the lowest common denominator of their expected audience, you get shit.
My favorite puzzles flow naturally from a difficult game: How do I organize my defenses to repel an attack from a superior force; what combination of spells can I use to kill a dragon without being fried, etc. If you ask a game writer to explicitly compose a puzzle you're asking for garbage, and you will certainly get it.
I'm for all plausible technologies for generating electricity which don't emit CO2. I think there's hope for large wind and solar-thermal generating grids, but these will come online too slowly and still cost too much.
That's why I'm convinced that we'll be burning coal till my death unless we also supplement these with a big deployment of nuclear. I'm also a leftist-environmentalist, but I really feel betrayed by Gore.
I wonder how hard and useful it would be to merge these photos into Google Sky. They probably don't have exact coordinate info... or do they? ... and maybe Google already has deeper pictures, but wow, if all Hubble photos could be stitched together and made available with such a great interface, that would be awesome.
OK, that was a good read, and it made me rather optimistic that the American DOE ultimately agrees with France that full fast breeder reactors are the future of nuclear power. But they're also scary, and there needs to be a lot of research before we start building them on a large scale, so I am a strong advocate for starting now.
If this thing could be configured as a router, it would be incredibly awesome. Not only would it be far more configurable than the basic router, but it could also be the only computing device in my house that would have to stay on 24/7.
This is because, in addition to router/access-point functions, it could run Bittorrent and ed2k servers in the background, as well as an FTP server and a simple web server for my personal use. This way, I could remotely Wake-On-Lan any computer in my home from anywhere in the world, and transfer files. Right now, because I like using my nighttime bandwidth for uploading to Bittorrent, I leave on a 100+ watt computer all the time. This is very inefficient, and I'd love to offload that function on a 2 watt router device.
I know we've been promised OLED displays, but if solid-state blue LEDs are going to be cheap, I want them to make a screen from them. (I know green and red are absurdly cheap; the blue ones were holding this back.) I'm sure they could make them much smaller, but suppose you had a 3-diode pixel that was 5mm across. A high-definition display made from these would be almost ten meters wide, which would be awesome in movie theater, a stadium or an outdoor display. Plus, it should be pretty simple to yank out and replace any pixel that burns out. These would be incredibly power-efficient, because they would use no power at all to display black. Basically, you could use them for super-efficient, programmable room lighting as well - and how cool would that be?
There is no reason to make waste that's dangerous for 10,000 years. In advanced countries like France, which has the cleanest air and the cheapest power in Europe, the waste from its many reactors is separated and the heavy atoms (which are responsible for almost all long-term radioactivity of unprocessed waste) are fissile and are used to make more electricity.
They thought about making dumping sites for what remains (and it's far less dangerous than the 10,000-year figure), but nobody liked that, so the waste is stored at the plant itself waiting to be used for something in the future.
I'm pretty sure that we'll need that stuff for something, and it will be a pain to dig it up.
With proper reprocessing, reactor waste can be made less radioactive than the mined ore in a span of 300 years, so nuclear power could potentially reduce the radioactivity in the world.
I was given an old P3-600 Sony laptop with a dead battery. Turns out it only needed a new disk, and it badly needed to get rid of Windows ME.
Because of the dead battery (which is too expensive to replace), it's important that I get quick boot times, and XP hibernation is the answer. I can go from unplugged/unpowered to full desktop in six seconds. One reason why it's so fast is because it only had 256MB of ram, so the memory image loads fast. I love it.
Because of this positive experience with XP, i decided to load it up on my living room networked media PC (also gifted). It runs on a very inefficient P4 Celeron, so it shouldn't be left on. However, it's also sometimes needed as an FTP server, in case I need to retrieve some files from work. Luckily, XP hibernate is fully compatible with Wake-on-Lan. This means that all I need to do is to send a magic packet from work to my server and bedroom computer, wait a few seconds, and then everything works. The trickier part is remotely turning putting them back on hibernate, for which I use TightVNC.
The truth is, Dr. Hawking has reached the retireable age of 66 and though he's still very lucid, it's customary for universities to shell out the big bucks for professors who are in their prime. Statistically, it's pretty unlikely that Dr. Hawking has a whole lot of great ideas left in him. The physics work for which he's famous was in the 60's and 70's. Plus, it's kind of in bad taste to think of him as a trophy - not that all US universities lack bad taste.
Anyway, I think this open speculation has more to do with trying to shake down the British government for a bit of extra research money, to avoid the UK's embarrassment of losing their most prominent homegrown talent, who occupies Newton's old chair. And that's probably the greatest thing that Dr. Hawking can do for physics now: Bring in money, increase awareness and generate press.
If you read the thread you were replying to, you'd see that the very topic of debate is about how circumstances are correlated with opportunity to display one's brilliance. So cities with more inventors etc. could be (and almost certainly are) a sign of a certain cultural and economic climate which encourages it. Maybe all the goatherds of Albania are as smart as Newton. How would we notice? Maybe Newton would have been a very average goatherd, or worse. That was the point!
But if we accept your shoddy evidence, you'll also have to admit that cities had spurts of brilliance at specific times - Athens in 400BC, Copenhagen in the late 20s, Vienna around 1900, etc. Would you suggest that the cities smartened up or dumbed down on a time scale of one generation? Or is it rather that the social circumstances changed while the intellectual talent of the people stayed the same? Of course there are brain drains throughout history, but that doesn't explain any of the examples I gave.
I don't know how your comment got modded up. Your remark about agrarian countries lacking brilliant people is totally reprehensible - and stupid. Yes, you're stupid.
This post was far more informative and useful than TFA. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. You're more of a power user than I am (I wouldn't know how to hack an .msi file to not do version checks, for example), and if you had this sort of trouble, I would have my hair ripped out!
That sure would be a downer if these solar concentrators were destroyed by solar radiation. Watch out if the warranty is only 90 days!
So when photovoltaics say they're 35% efficient, does that mean power conversion efficiency? Or is it this quantum efficiency, which seems somehow less relevant than, you know, the amount of power that the cell can produce?
I think that some sort of an electric bus would make a whole lot more sense. It could use efficient but slow charging batteries which could be swapped out for charging at the depot two or three times each day. That sounds cumbersome but would require far less infrastructure than overhead wiring, etc.
I like how things are here in Europe, but the US can't be aping the Europeans (or their former selves) in the 21st century. Hell, in our suburbs our power, phone and cable still run from overground wooden poles and drape across the street. Imagine a tram on a street like that.
I think the ideal power source is an underground wire going to your house, with all the electrons you need, and that costs you very little. Fusion power would be just like that: Massive, industrial, pointless on a small scale, and awesome.
Let's use our rooftops for gardens!