Yeah, I thought about this too. I think this might even work in countries that are able to respect standards. It would be a good solution in Japan, since they produce a lot of their own cars and local manufacturers can just standardize on a universal battery form factor and design. It might work in China, where local companies could start making their own electric cars and have standards imposed on them from above. Actually, these would be very good things.
But it's not likely to happen in Europe; the EU is too weak to achieve the necessary standartization. And it definitely happen in north america.
Here's what I don't get: How exactly would the increasing bandwidth useage of customers force their ISP to come crawling to Google? Since the ISPs have a de facto monopoly in most markets, their more demanding customers will just be told "Tough shit: you assholes saturated our network and now your connection is slow. It's not our problem, it's that evil bittorrent." Have they ever done anything else in response to traffic slowdowns? To picture them crawling on their knees to Google because they want oh-so-badly to provide customers with the bandwidth they want... that's just funny.
Remember that the big beneficieries of the end of net neutrality will be the "last mile" owners, the ISP's. But yes, if Google has many data centers around the country, they could just provide free wireless for everyone, or at least threaten to if the ISP's don't play ball. They've done it in San Francisco, even got some city money for it. Since they wouldn't have to pay bandwith costs (they own the network), hardware fix-it and installation guys (it's wireless), and billing/customer support staff (it's free), they might keep their costs low enough to really make it worth their while to give it away. In any case, it's smart of them to be buying "real" property while there's still money to go around.
More puzzlingly, he assumes these probes can repair themselves for and keep running for billions of years, but they can't self-replicate. Really? If the probe can repair every potential internal probem on its own, the capacity to self-replicate should come almost for free.
This work is irrelevant to the Fermi paradox since Fermi assumed the probes would replicate themselves. Here is what Bjork says about self-replication:
In fact if self-replicating probes, or von Neumann
probes as they are also termed, were used to explore
the Galaxy it has been shown that a search of the entire
Galaxy will take 4 106
3 108 years dependent on the
speed of the probes (Tipler 1980). This is much faster than
using the non-replicative probes proposed in this paper.
However, one should note that there could be complications
with using self-replicating probes. Tipler (1980)
himself points out that the program controlling the self-replicating
probes would have to have so high an intelligence
that it might "go into business for itself" and become
out of control of the humans who designed it, resulting
in unforeseeable consequences. Since the machines
uses the same resources as humans, a self-replicating machine
might regards humans as competitors and try to exterminate
them. Chyba (2005) also points out that self-replicating
probes-might evolve to prey on each other, creating
a sort of machine food-chain. This would of cause
drastically reduce their exploration rate.
Therefore the conclusion is that if perfect selfreplicating
probes could be built, these could explore the
Galaxy much faster than the probes suggested here. However,
building less-then-perfect self-replicating probes
could, in the worst case scenario, have fatal consequences
for the human race.
I think the real debate should be about self-replicating probes. Is the author assuming that every civilization capable of building these is automatically freaked out by potential doomsday scenarios, to the extent that none will be built? Even if it is foolish, I found that it pays to expect more foolishness in the universe rather than less.
Good point. Good post. I suspect the same thing, though I suspect it's about 40% real. I do think the guy is serious about getting into the suit and taking a bullet, but the picture is almost certainly embellished - and that should make us suspicious.
Yeah, Cairo will definitely support SVG in some principled way, and I think it will also render PDFs without a plugin. I imagine it will eventually do MathML and other specialized XML rendering. But at this point, it's too soon to wring our hands about how it will be faster. Cairo right now is miserably slow. Hopefully that will improve by release-time.
I have a feeling that the 2.x.x branch of Firefox will live on for a very long time, and will continue having bugfix and security updates. If you're running Win98, it will certainly not be the weak point in your system in terms of security or stability! My point is that if by your standards you consider Win98 good enough to use, there will always be a version of Firefox that far exceeds your standards. And I mean, by many miles.
Re:Cairo is kind of slow now
on
Firefox 3 In Alpha
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, I totally agree. I'm also hoping that Gecko coders will turn their attention towards optimizing Cairo, because its current performance is unacceptable. According to this benchmark, Cairo's rendering performance isn't just somewhat slower than its open-source rival Qt. It's something like 700% slower. If that doesn't improve dramatically before Mozilla's 3.0 release, it will account for dreadfully many wasted CPU cycles.
I understand the decision to go with Cairo, but like you said, I hope it's coupled with a commitment to seriously fix Cairo.!
Does it really sound like the public is being served by the private media? Don't you wish we would have been a bit savvier when, through being misinformed, we supported our politicians in their attack on Iraq?
I think you're right on. Many people say that the next generation of high-def DVDs will be the last. I get it. Ten years from now, data distribution will be done over the internet. For backup, we will use cheap magnetic disks, which (if left alone and stored correctly) are much more durable than optical disks. For media portability, we will use iPods or flash. There will be no role left for the optical disk.
The parent post gives another reason for the decline and inevitable death of optical disks.
Apple wouldn't actually have to buy Nintendo. They could just partner up. Nintendo has nothing to lose and lots to gain. Just to get a bit of Apple's good vibes halo would really help them. Unfortunately, Apple have been too busy mending fences with Sony and this would more than undo all that.
Here's a concept that should be considered: Apple are clearly wanting to build a living-room device that displays content from the network and internet on the television. The hardware they will use will be better than the mere "just enough" to get the job done. So why not invest a couple of extra bucks and partner up with Nintendo so their living room device plays Gamecube and Revolution games? Surely future Apple hardware could hack it. Neither side has anything to lose: Apple's living room device becomes more versatile while the market for Nintendo games grows substantially. Plus, don't underestimate the the value of Steve Jobs and countless Apple ads saying the word "Nintendo" on multiple occasions. Nintendo need the added mindshare.
But don't forget that these "freetime" projects you do belong to Google since you were doing them while on their payroll. Any patents that might be generated along the way will also belong to Google. I think this is a brilliant strategy to prevent future defection:
First you allow your smart employees to follow their whims while working for you, so they get a sense of personal fulfillment which reduces their desire to strike out on their own. Then, if they do strike out on their own, they will probably need to buy back a lot of their own IP from Google - which Google isn't obligated to sell. Ad to this some implied promise like "If you defect and compete with us, we will suffocate you by doing what you do except bigger" and loyalty is pretty much 100% assured.
This is a very different system from Microsoft, where many of their smart employees don't get to do what they want. The guy who started RealNetworks had a pretty high position in MS, but he couldn't convince the higher-level paper-pushers that a video player would be a good idea. So he went off on his own, and MS had to make the WMP to try and suffocate him post-facto (at which they failed). If Microsoft worked like Google, RealPlayer would have been an MS product from the beginning and their strangle hold on us would have been much tighter.
Realistically, I don't think that any nuclear station would need to have down-time. If the public grid was producing enough of its own power, the nuclear plant's energy would go to hydrogen electrolysis. After all, even in an energy utopia, we'll need energy in some sort of a transportable form - say for cars and rockets.
You're exactly right about all this. It's not that I have buyer's regret about my E6300, but I would have been almost as happy with an X2 4200, and I surely would have had a better mobo than my terrible MSI P965 Neo-F. As a lifetime AMD buyer I fell for some serious hype and bought into thinking that I'd be dumb to not buy a Core2. It's not that I'm kicking myself, but the grass on Intel's side is not as green as the hype said it was.
Most disappointing to me is that the heat dissipation of the E6300 really isn't better than AMD, despite the 65nm and the Pentium M heritage. I suspect that this is because SOI prevents a lot of electon leakage. This makes me think AMD's SOI 65nm will be a whole lot more efficient than Intel's non-SOI.
But for someone who needs a low-end dual-core, the 4200 and the E6300 are about the same on every apples-to-apples comparison, so take a look at motherboards and let that make the decision for you. If you go with Intel, make sure you get a mobo that can overclock. The 6300 can take it.
Seiously, how many "Britney spotted naked" pictures will there be? Although, if they're supposed to look like they're from cell phone cameras, they're going to have to be run through the crappifying filter! Perhaps slightly more seriously, how many fake pictures will there be of politicians in "compromising" situations?
And a related worry: Did these Reuters people just give up on doing their own journalism? Do they do anything except copy AP stories?
Probably the first thing he'd do in office is change that generic emergency broadcast message to look like a BSOD which would say: "A fatal exception 0E has occured to your country. Please reinstall the government."
Wow, I can't fault you for lack of ambition! However, the quests you describe as "generated" sound better than many of the quests in published games. This means that the generating system would somehow have to be better than human beings. Well, it would make an interesting Turing test...
What would be necessary for your system to work would be detailed world-simulation. By this I mean that there would be a world of NPCs who lead interesting lives, with or without PCs looking in. All their activities and interactions are simulated on the game server, including eating, working, commuting, etc. Somehow the setting would have to be tuned so that it's roughly at an equilibrium if left undisturbed. Then PCs really could change the world: They could band together to enslave an entire village, while another group might be setting out to free them. And yes, normal things like children getting lost would happen with or without PC interference. (Usually, they'd be found without PC help.)
There are many problems in implementing a system like this. One of them is the incredible processing power that it would need. A much bigger problem would be writing a simulation of human intelligence and motivations that would determine what each character would do. Many of them would live very monotonous lives, but still, even the village miller could get pretty riled up if some passing stranger stabbed the carpenter who lives on his street. How would the village try to exact a retribution? How would they make a reasonable judgement about what reactions are appropriate? What they would do as a group would arise out of the decisions of each simulated individual and the results of their mutual conversations, but it would have to be an amazing simulation if they were to respond in a character-appropriate way.
Well, I don't want to go too far off on a tangent. My point was that generating adventures probably won't work unless you have permanent simulation of everything in the world, in both psychology and physics. I think this is the ultimate goal of massive online worlds, but even Moore's law won't make this a reality in our lifetimes.
For people who like technology, Who Killed the Electric Car is a great documentary, though painful to watch. If we all have our geek moral compass properly, we will all have an instinctive aversion to the ham-handed stifling of cool technology for political reasons... and this movie documents one very clear, infuriating case of that.
Seriously, I know it wouldn't look very cool, but bumper-car-like bumpers for road cars might go a long way towards solving these sorts of problems. Given that no one would be driving very fast in the towns, the bumpers would absorb the damage in case there was a misunderstanding. They'd also be wonderful for parking. Since Belgium has a lot of small cars already, this seems like the logical next step. Of course, I don't know how to help cyclists and pedestrians, but let's solve one problem at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's not likely to happen in Europe; the EU is too weak to achieve the necessary standartization. And it definitely happen in north america.
Thank you for the information. I wish this had been the first post, it would have saved me a lot of pointless reading.
Here's what I don't get: How exactly would the increasing bandwidth useage of customers force their ISP to come crawling to Google? Since the ISPs have a de facto monopoly in most markets, their more demanding customers will just be told "Tough shit: you assholes saturated our network and now your connection is slow. It's not our problem, it's that evil bittorrent." Have they ever done anything else in response to traffic slowdowns? To picture them crawling on their knees to Google because they want oh-so-badly to provide customers with the bandwidth they want... that's just funny.
Remember that the big beneficieries of the end of net neutrality will be the "last mile" owners, the ISP's. But yes, if Google has many data centers around the country, they could just provide free wireless for everyone, or at least threaten to if the ISP's don't play ball. They've done it in San Francisco, even got some city money for it. Since they wouldn't have to pay bandwith costs (they own the network), hardware fix-it and installation guys (it's wireless), and billing/customer support staff (it's free), they might keep their costs low enough to really make it worth their while to give it away. In any case, it's smart of them to be buying "real" property while there's still money to go around.
I wasn't aware of any Law of Extraterrestrial Wisdom which states that no extraterrestrial civilization ever follows through on a "bad idea."
More puzzlingly, he assumes these probes can repair themselves for and keep running for billions of years, but they can't self-replicate. Really? If the probe can repair every potential internal probem on its own, the capacity to self-replicate should come almost for free.
I think the real debate should be about self-replicating probes. Is the author assuming that every civilization capable of building these is automatically freaked out by potential doomsday scenarios, to the extent that none will be built? Even if it is foolish, I found that it pays to expect more foolishness in the universe rather than less.
Good point. Good post. I suspect the same thing, though I suspect it's about 40% real. I do think the guy is serious about getting into the suit and taking a bullet, but the picture is almost certainly embellished - and that should make us suspicious.
Yet again, the French must swoop in and save civilization. They must be getting tired of it by now!
Yeah, Cairo will definitely support SVG in some principled way, and I think it will also render PDFs without a plugin. I imagine it will eventually do MathML and other specialized XML rendering. But at this point, it's too soon to wring our hands about how it will be faster. Cairo right now is miserably slow. Hopefully that will improve by release-time.
I have a feeling that the 2.x.x branch of Firefox will live on for a very long time, and will continue having bugfix and security updates. If you're running Win98, it will certainly not be the weak point in your system in terms of security or stability! My point is that if by your standards you consider Win98 good enough to use, there will always be a version of Firefox that far exceeds your standards. And I mean, by many miles.
I understand the decision to go with Cairo, but like you said, I hope it's coupled with a commitment to seriously fix Cairo.!
Does it really sound like the public is being served by the private media? Don't you wish we would have been a bit savvier when, through being misinformed, we supported our politicians in their attack on Iraq?
The parent post gives another reason for the decline and inevitable death of optical disks.
Apple wouldn't actually have to buy Nintendo. They could just partner up. Nintendo has nothing to lose and lots to gain. Just to get a bit of Apple's good vibes halo would really help them. Unfortunately, Apple have been too busy mending fences with Sony and this would more than undo all that.
Here's a concept that should be considered: Apple are clearly wanting to build a living-room device that displays content from the network and internet on the television. The hardware they will use will be better than the mere "just enough" to get the job done. So why not invest a couple of extra bucks and partner up with Nintendo so their living room device plays Gamecube and Revolution games? Surely future Apple hardware could hack it. Neither side has anything to lose: Apple's living room device becomes more versatile while the market for Nintendo games grows substantially. Plus, don't underestimate the the value of Steve Jobs and countless Apple ads saying the word "Nintendo" on multiple occasions. Nintendo need the added mindshare.
First you allow your smart employees to follow their whims while working for you, so they get a sense of personal fulfillment which reduces their desire to strike out on their own. Then, if they do strike out on their own, they will probably need to buy back a lot of their own IP from Google - which Google isn't obligated to sell. Ad to this some implied promise like "If you defect and compete with us, we will suffocate you by doing what you do except bigger" and loyalty is pretty much 100% assured.
This is a very different system from Microsoft, where many of their smart employees don't get to do what they want. The guy who started RealNetworks had a pretty high position in MS, but he couldn't convince the higher-level paper-pushers that a video player would be a good idea. So he went off on his own, and MS had to make the WMP to try and suffocate him post-facto (at which they failed). If Microsoft worked like Google, RealPlayer would have been an MS product from the beginning and their strangle hold on us would have been much tighter.
Realistically, I don't think that any nuclear station would need to have down-time. If the public grid was producing enough of its own power, the nuclear plant's energy would go to hydrogen electrolysis. After all, even in an energy utopia, we'll need energy in some sort of a transportable form - say for cars and rockets.
Most disappointing to me is that the heat dissipation of the E6300 really isn't better than AMD, despite the 65nm and the Pentium M heritage. I suspect that this is because SOI prevents a lot of electon leakage. This makes me think AMD's SOI 65nm will be a whole lot more efficient than Intel's non-SOI.
But for someone who needs a low-end dual-core, the 4200 and the E6300 are about the same on every apples-to-apples comparison, so take a look at motherboards and let that make the decision for you. If you go with Intel, make sure you get a mobo that can overclock. The 6300 can take it.
And a related worry: Did these Reuters people just give up on doing their own journalism? Do they do anything except copy AP stories?
Probably the first thing he'd do in office is change that generic emergency broadcast message to look like a BSOD which would say: "A fatal exception 0E has occured to your country. Please reinstall the government."
What would be necessary for your system to work would be detailed world-simulation. By this I mean that there would be a world of NPCs who lead interesting lives, with or without PCs looking in. All their activities and interactions are simulated on the game server, including eating, working, commuting, etc. Somehow the setting would have to be tuned so that it's roughly at an equilibrium if left undisturbed. Then PCs really could change the world: They could band together to enslave an entire village, while another group might be setting out to free them. And yes, normal things like children getting lost would happen with or without PC interference. (Usually, they'd be found without PC help.)
There are many problems in implementing a system like this. One of them is the incredible processing power that it would need. A much bigger problem would be writing a simulation of human intelligence and motivations that would determine what each character would do. Many of them would live very monotonous lives, but still, even the village miller could get pretty riled up if some passing stranger stabbed the carpenter who lives on his street. How would the village try to exact a retribution? How would they make a reasonable judgement about what reactions are appropriate? What they would do as a group would arise out of the decisions of each simulated individual and the results of their mutual conversations, but it would have to be an amazing simulation if they were to respond in a character-appropriate way.
Well, I don't want to go too far off on a tangent. My point was that generating adventures probably won't work unless you have permanent simulation of everything in the world, in both psychology and physics. I think this is the ultimate goal of massive online worlds, but even Moore's law won't make this a reality in our lifetimes.
Dude, it looks like you know a bit too much about where to find game console disassembly pics. Wanna talk about it?
For people who like technology, Who Killed the Electric Car is a great documentary, though painful to watch. If we all have our geek moral compass properly, we will all have an instinctive aversion to the ham-handed stifling of cool technology for political reasons... and this movie documents one very clear, infuriating case of that.
Seriously, I know it wouldn't look very cool, but bumper-car-like bumpers for road cars might go a long way towards solving these sorts of problems. Given that no one would be driving very fast in the towns, the bumpers would absorb the damage in case there was a misunderstanding. They'd also be wonderful for parking. Since Belgium has a lot of small cars already, this seems like the logical next step. Of course, I don't know how to help cyclists and pedestrians, but let's solve one problem at a time.