The article is pretty unclear. I assume that coding for Civ4 is well under way; Civ3 has been out for a while. Will this affect development? Or is it that Firaxis will just be coding for new masters, and little will change in the project? Wow, I would sure hate to see this excellent series start floundering for reasons of ownership...
Re:I'd love a cheap, mass produced 200 mile electr
on
230mph Electric Car
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· Score: 4, Insightful
No, I think the point is that the Chinese want to wait until owning an electric car is a realistic proposition for normal people, which means densely-distributed filling/charging stations and other infrastructure. They would understandably want Japanese, European and American auto makers to put that stuff in place (probably by pulling political strings, as they certainly can).
You could have an awesome electric car for sale now, and nobody will buy it, for fear of being stranded.
I always knew that we've got "combustion lock-in" which always seemed a bit irrational to me. I guess I didn't think it might be because of a conspiracy to shut out emerging auto competition. But is that a crazy explanation? Not really.
But... here's a way China could really kick our ass if they wanted to: They set up the infrastructure in their own country to run electric cars, get good at making them, and laugh at us while we're sending billions per week to the Middle East. It's not like the Chinese market is small, and I bet they could export the tech to India, Thailand, etc. That's enough to get this caught on. China is beginning to realize that they have the luxury of giving the world the finger. They can make their own DVD format, their own fancy cell phones, etc., and just aim those things at the domestic market... and they do fine! It might not be easy for them to break through with auto manufacturing, but I expect them to try (I don't know, have they already? I know they had some Porsche engineers meeting with the government asking them to propose a Wagen for the Chinese Volk....) The Chinese government might still have enough power to "give incentives" to large numbers of people to buy domestic cars once they're made. Of course, they could do that more effectively still if they start taxing gas at $10/gallon and using the proceeds to subsidize electric cars. It's in their interest anyway; they don't have a lot of domestic oil either.
Wow, you think they could do that, and couldn't sneak maybe 20 nukes into US cities? Personally, I'd be a lot more scared of the latter. I think it's pretty likely that whatever cargo goes up in the space elevator would be scanned. I don't have the same confidence in the integrity of our borders and ports.
You're not thinking about this hard enough. It doesn't matter that we live on Earth. No sane person could consider actually sending humans into space on this elevator. How long do you think it would take a person to travel 40,000 Km up a cable in an elevator? I remember my cross-country trip from California to Boston took an entire week of fast driving, and that was about a tenth of the distance (4000Km).
The article mentions this: Space elevators are for cargo and freight, which aren't in a hurry and don't need heavy radiation shielding. And yes, there are plenty of useful materials on the moon, probably just as many as on Earth, and maybe more. We'd be stupid to lift stuff from Earth if we could get it on the moon and not have to fight with our gravity and atmosphere.
Although... I'd prefer a magnetic rail launcher that accelerates things to lunar escape velocity and shoots them into orbit.
Your post makes no sense. If you prefer to stay behind the cutting on speed, you should not buy from the top of AMD's line. You don't need to be an economist to figure that out. The fact that AMD has something better than what you (or I) can afford should have nothing to do with your decision about what chip to buy. The question is: can you get identical performance for less from AMD, or, better performance for the same price? And I think the answer to both questions is a pretty clear "yes". The parent suggested that you can get both at the same time, a better price and better performance, and honestly, I think this is right. For example, if you look at the 3500+ I'm almost sure there are more expensive Intel chips that don't perform as well.
Look, just because you have a nice gun doesn't mean you can troll here (more specifically, repeat essentially verbatum the Pentagon's tired propaganda and present is as "eyewitness testimony"). I'm sure you served with some good people, but please, give me an estimate of how many cents of every dollar we spend in Iraq goes to building schools and sanitation and powerplants, and other humanitarian projects. Seeing that Baghdad has more blackouts now than it did under Saddam, my guess is, it's not even one cent. So don't whine when TV doesn't cover it. It's essentially a sideshow. They do stories about where the other 99c go.
And now tell me this: did we fix more than we broke? Are we going to before we leave? I wasn't in Falluja but I saw some pretty scary pictures and heard some testimony to the effect that evey building has some sort of a hole in it. Those holes weren't there in 2003. Don't tell me we're all humanitarian and stuff unless you know that we are going to fix those holes with US money.
Your predictable lines make me think the next one will be something to the effect that "sure they now breathe uranium dust and don't have roofs on their houses or hinges on their doors... but they have freedom. At least don't say that while Iraq is under marshall law ("state of emergency") which will last into January according to their new Saddam named Allawi.
Dear President Bush. Thank you for your kind warning about the attack. Your army has nice tanks and airplanes. But now we are going to start shooting back for real, and so I humbly advise you and your soldiers to go home if you don't want to die.
Well, it's not AI in the sense the purists mean. It's more about simulating intelligent behavior with conditional scripts. But for a shooter, that's all you want. You don't need real learning or anything of that sort.
Yeah, but I'd shiver at the sight of Firefox designed for AOLlers. I always install mine with Adblock, I bet you AOL's version will be installed with AdAdd, a new extension they're writing now!
You know, something troubles me. Whenever weird "accidents" happen, like a block of votes being counted twice, the party that benefits is always the Republicans. There have been at many confirmed voting errors in Florida and Ohio alone, and all of them, when fixed, help Democrats and hurt Republicans.
Yeah, you're right. What the parent should have said is that a decent person who wailed about the shortcomings of that particular entry and wrote them up in detail would fix the Hamilton entry.
Maybe it's morally permissible to be an asshole, but you still shouldn't be one. The point is that if the guy did go in and fix the entry, like he very easily could have, he would have demonstrated just how stupid his argument in the op-ed piece really was. Then the new conclusion is that you can make the Wikipedia good! Look even the old editors of Britannica are fixing entries!
What would suck, though, is if some 12-year-old 1337 d00d then overwrote this guy's Hamilton entry with his school essay, which begins like this: "The $10 bill has Hamilton, which makes Hamilton really important in history. He was a president a long time ago, even b4 my grandparent were born. If he lived now he'd be very very old, and if I could talk to him now I would ask him what it was like to be president all that time ago...."
Well, I've noticed a similar trend. Mind you, I've said and thought stupid things too on occasion - that doesn't in and of itself make me ignorant. I like to think that some of the uninformed and flat-out dumb comments we read come from people who are very young. They're supposed to make dumb mistakes, and we do a good thing by straightening them out.
But maybe a system like online forums where they are just as much a part of the conversation as anyone else really just drags down the quality of discussion for everyone. Slashdot is the biggest blog in the world, so it's silly to hope that its audience would somehow be elite, or even consistently smart. The moderation system helps insulate us (those of us who don't browse at -1) from the dumbest ideas.
So Slashdot really is a frustrating read if you're unwilling to accept a pretty low signal to noise ratio. But some of the "signal" is worth catching, and there is something sociologically interesting about the ideas that the Slashdot horde seems to hold dear. Plus, you do a good thing by calling a bullshit comment what it is. There are plenty of good lessons learned here about how it's not "just your opinion, man" and about how some questions and ideas (and people) really are stupid. And yes, there have been good, deserved "takedowns" in the threads on Slashdot. So we should just accept that there are people here who are learning to think about stuff, and we should help them (which doesn't mean we shouldn't insult them - sometimes, that's the best way to make the point stick).
Also, the calculations are simple, once you realize that a 5W laser will put out fewer photons than a 100W light bulb. Now spread them out over "several million square miles" and stop worrying!
Well, if the whole earth lets them pass, what makes you think that your neutrino detector would stop them? Unless you really sent out a shitload. Still, the sun surely produces more neutrinos than any feasible broacaster ever could. There would be no way to distinguish signal from noise.
I think you're right, and I know it's off topic, but though I detest our present foreign policy, I don't want some other country to be a superpower either. Well, maybe some sane country like Norway or Canada, but China or India seem far more likely candidates.
I think after USA falls apart, the world should get together and have a "no superpowers" rule. But then again, there were no superpowers at the 70 years ago, and things didn't turn out so well. Europe sort of punched itself out, somebody else took over. We might not be far from that right now.
That's not totally right. They also have membership only Sam's Club grocery stores, and there they are very anal about marking exactly who buys what. It's not like in those grocery stores where a friendly checkout cashier will swipe his card to give you the sales, instead of making you dig up yours. So I think that's one big sorce of data that's not anonymous (does that word have an antonym? is it ananonymous? - or just onymous?).
I bet that some of the rest of the data is actually surveilenve video, or video of customer behavior (what products they handle without buying, what sections of aisles draw their looks, that sort of thing. Yeah, seems creepy, but they're not the only retail store to carefully study such things.) I bet you that data is a gold mine if you're a marketeer psychologist trying to figure out how to trick us into buying still more Chinese crap we don't need.
I figured out what the next big defense project is:
Gay-dar!
It will cost a trillion dollars, but everybody that matters will love it! (And that group consists of: Hick Christians, defense companies and people who want to shut down the federal government by making it go bankrupt. Why do these groups matter? Because they're obviously in charge.)
I think you're almost right... the truth is, building and operating one of these planes has got to be orders of magnitude more expensive than just building a few extra nukes and launchers (and decoys to fool the laser, they're just cheap mylar baloons.) How many times will this be able to fire, once per minute? Whatever enemy we might have will just launch a few extras, just in case this works in real combat (by some miracle). The bottom line is that if we're in a nuclear war, the development of this project will more likely lead to more radioactive craters in the USA, not fewer. I sure don't feel safer.
But I know who does feel better with this system in place - Boeiiiiinngggg!
So the arms race this will start is one where every country wants to have enough nukes to overwhelm the US defences, which for a few decades should be pretty easy.
Rummsfeld himslelf said that missile defense does not need to physically work in order to be effective. The enemy just has to believe that it might work, and that belief will itself deter them from launching something. The press righly called that the "Scarecrow Defense", but that's back when we had a free press, as in early-to-mid 2001. Now they just say "yes, sir, Mr. Rummsfeld sir!" and do this weird salute with their right arm extended forward.
I tell you, I never thought of myself as a reactionary, but I want the old USA back.
I like it. It's a good idea. I hope some large corporates consider this. I still don't have a good sense of just how much you can do with XUL... but if somebody wrote some VB->XUL migration tools, we might be in buisiness!
I think you're exactly right. I did the same calculation myself and it's why I still don't own a DVD burner. I burn CD's for the car and for friends, but since most of them can now play CD's with MP3 at home and in their car, I don't have to burn very many. And if I want to trade data, I use an external hard drive or let friends FTP from me.
Most of the data on my hard drive is "consumeable", the sort of thing I watch and delete. Stuff builds up and I don't delete all the useless files, because I have so much spare HD space and I'm lazy. But I'm not coming across much data that I insist on keeping "for posterity" - and the stuff I think of in that way would never get burned on a disk which is so easy to damage. Or, it might, but it would live on a hard drive as well. I have 6 live hard drives right now, and space for a few more. By the time I gunk up my newest one, drive space will be less than US20c/GB, so I'll spend another $100 and double my capacity. Hurrah to the hard drive makers!
No, we're not gonna be downloading everything, if the data footprint of one movie is 20-30 GB. Yes, bandwith available to people is increasing, but even now, downloading low-definition 5GB DVD movies is just at the edge of practicality with a decent connection.
It's no accident that Netflix moves around more data through the mail each day than the entire internet does in the same amount of time.
Slashdot Mirror
The article is pretty unclear. I assume that coding for Civ4 is well under way; Civ3 has been out for a while. Will this affect development? Or is it that Firaxis will just be coding for new masters, and little will change in the project? Wow, I would sure hate to see this excellent series start floundering for reasons of ownership...
You could have an awesome electric car for sale now, and nobody will buy it, for fear of being stranded.
I always knew that we've got "combustion lock-in" which always seemed a bit irrational to me. I guess I didn't think it might be because of a conspiracy to shut out emerging auto competition. But is that a crazy explanation? Not really.
But... here's a way China could really kick our ass if they wanted to: They set up the infrastructure in their own country to run electric cars, get good at making them, and laugh at us while we're sending billions per week to the Middle East. It's not like the Chinese market is small, and I bet they could export the tech to India, Thailand, etc. That's enough to get this caught on. China is beginning to realize that they have the luxury of giving the world the finger. They can make their own DVD format, their own fancy cell phones, etc., and just aim those things at the domestic market... and they do fine! It might not be easy for them to break through with auto manufacturing, but I expect them to try (I don't know, have they already? I know they had some Porsche engineers meeting with the government asking them to propose a Wagen for the Chinese Volk....) The Chinese government might still have enough power to "give incentives" to large numbers of people to buy domestic cars once they're made. Of course, they could do that more effectively still if they start taxing gas at $10/gallon and using the proceeds to subsidize electric cars. It's in their interest anyway; they don't have a lot of domestic oil either.
Wow, you think they could do that, and couldn't sneak maybe 20 nukes into US cities? Personally, I'd be a lot more scared of the latter. I think it's pretty likely that whatever cargo goes up in the space elevator would be scanned. I don't have the same confidence in the integrity of our borders and ports.
The article mentions this: Space elevators are for cargo and freight, which aren't in a hurry and don't need heavy radiation shielding. And yes, there are plenty of useful materials on the moon, probably just as many as on Earth, and maybe more. We'd be stupid to lift stuff from Earth if we could get it on the moon and not have to fight with our gravity and atmosphere.
Although ... I'd prefer a magnetic rail launcher that accelerates things to lunar escape velocity and shoots them into orbit.
Your post makes no sense. If you prefer to stay behind the cutting on speed, you should not buy from the top of AMD's line. You don't need to be an economist to figure that out. The fact that AMD has something better than what you (or I) can afford should have nothing to do with your decision about what chip to buy. The question is: can you get identical performance for less from AMD, or, better performance for the same price? And I think the answer to both questions is a pretty clear "yes". The parent suggested that you can get both at the same time, a better price and better performance, and honestly, I think this is right. For example, if you look at the 3500+ I'm almost sure there are more expensive Intel chips that don't perform as well.
Sir, you are a moron.
But I agree, it's stupid to tax gas. Poor people buy almost as much gas as the super-rich, so most of the gas tax is paid by them.
Here's an idea: How about a progressive income tax?
And now tell me this: did we fix more than we broke? Are we going to before we leave? I wasn't in Falluja but I saw some pretty scary pictures and heard some testimony to the effect that evey building has some sort of a hole in it. Those holes weren't there in 2003. Don't tell me we're all humanitarian and stuff unless you know that we are going to fix those holes with US money.
Your predictable lines make me think the next one will be something to the effect that "sure they now breathe uranium dust and don't have roofs on their houses or hinges on their doors... but they have freedom. At least don't say that while Iraq is under marshall law ("state of emergency") which will last into January according to their new Saddam named Allawi.
Thank you, Iraqis
Well, it's not AI in the sense the purists mean. It's more about simulating intelligent behavior with conditional scripts. But for a shooter, that's all you want. You don't need real learning or anything of that sort.
Yeah, but I'd shiver at the sight of Firefox designed for AOLlers. I always install mine with Adblock, I bet you AOL's version will be installed with AdAdd, a new extension they're writing now!
You know, something troubles me. Whenever weird "accidents" happen, like a block of votes being counted twice, the party that benefits is always the Republicans. There have been at many confirmed voting errors in Florida and Ohio alone, and all of them, when fixed, help Democrats and hurt Republicans.
Maybe it's morally permissible to be an asshole, but you still shouldn't be one. The point is that if the guy did go in and fix the entry, like he very easily could have, he would have demonstrated just how stupid his argument in the op-ed piece really was. Then the new conclusion is that you can make the Wikipedia good! Look even the old editors of Britannica are fixing entries!
What would suck, though, is if some 12-year-old 1337 d00d then overwrote this guy's Hamilton entry with his school essay, which begins like this: "The $10 bill has Hamilton, which makes Hamilton really important in history. He was a president a long time ago, even b4 my grandparent were born. If he lived now he'd be very very old, and if I could talk to him now I would ask him what it was like to be president all that time ago...."
Not to give people any ideas.
But maybe a system like online forums where they are just as much a part of the conversation as anyone else really just drags down the quality of discussion for everyone. Slashdot is the biggest blog in the world, so it's silly to hope that its audience would somehow be elite, or even consistently smart. The moderation system helps insulate us (those of us who don't browse at -1) from the dumbest ideas.
So Slashdot really is a frustrating read if you're unwilling to accept a pretty low signal to noise ratio. But some of the "signal" is worth catching, and there is something sociologically interesting about the ideas that the Slashdot horde seems to hold dear. Plus, you do a good thing by calling a bullshit comment what it is. There are plenty of good lessons learned here about how it's not "just your opinion, man" and about how some questions and ideas (and people) really are stupid. And yes, there have been good, deserved "takedowns" in the threads on Slashdot. So we should just accept that there are people here who are learning to think about stuff, and we should help them (which doesn't mean we shouldn't insult them - sometimes, that's the best way to make the point stick).
Also, the calculations are simple, once you realize that a 5W laser will put out fewer photons than a 100W light bulb. Now spread them out over "several million square miles" and stop worrying!
Well, if the whole earth lets them pass, what makes you think that your neutrino detector would stop them? Unless you really sent out a shitload. Still, the sun surely produces more neutrinos than any feasible broacaster ever could. There would be no way to distinguish signal from noise.
Yeah, that's a pretty slow ping... reminds me of that story about the Norwegian guys who used carrier pigeons to delive IP packets.
Look, strictly speaking, the first man, woman, dog, satellite, etc. in space were all European.
I think after USA falls apart, the world should get together and have a "no superpowers" rule. But then again, there were no superpowers at the 70 years ago, and things didn't turn out so well. Europe sort of punched itself out, somebody else took over. We might not be far from that right now.
I bet that some of the rest of the data is actually surveilenve video, or video of customer behavior (what products they handle without buying, what sections of aisles draw their looks, that sort of thing. Yeah, seems creepy, but they're not the only retail store to carefully study such things.) I bet you that data is a gold mine if you're a marketeer psychologist trying to figure out how to trick us into buying still more Chinese crap we don't need.
Gay-dar!
It will cost a trillion dollars, but everybody that matters will love it! (And that group consists of: Hick Christians, defense companies and people who want to shut down the federal government by making it go bankrupt. Why do these groups matter? Because they're obviously in charge.)
But I know who does feel better with this system in place - Boeiiiiinngggg!
So the arms race this will start is one where every country wants to have enough nukes to overwhelm the US defences, which for a few decades should be pretty easy.
Rummsfeld himslelf said that missile defense does not need to physically work in order to be effective. The enemy just has to believe that it might work, and that belief will itself deter them from launching something. The press righly called that the "Scarecrow Defense", but that's back when we had a free press, as in early-to-mid 2001. Now they just say "yes, sir, Mr. Rummsfeld sir!" and do this weird salute with their right arm extended forward.
I tell you, I never thought of myself as a reactionary, but I want the old USA back.
I like it. It's a good idea. I hope some large corporates consider this. I still don't have a good sense of just how much you can do with XUL... but if somebody wrote some VB->XUL migration tools, we might be in buisiness!
Most of the data on my hard drive is "consumeable", the sort of thing I watch and delete. Stuff builds up and I don't delete all the useless files, because I have so much spare HD space and I'm lazy. But I'm not coming across much data that I insist on keeping "for posterity" - and the stuff I think of in that way would never get burned on a disk which is so easy to damage. Or, it might, but it would live on a hard drive as well. I have 6 live hard drives right now, and space for a few more. By the time I gunk up my newest one, drive space will be less than US20c/GB, so I'll spend another $100 and double my capacity. Hurrah to the hard drive makers!
It's no accident that Netflix moves around more data through the mail each day than the entire internet does in the same amount of time.