Trek needs a series that tells stories in the Trek universe. It takes as many or as few episodes as it needs to tell the story the way the story should be told. When the story is done, they come up with another one. Switch casts for each story, maybe keep around a few actors who can play different parts, or occasionaly the same character in different stories.
Tell stories set entirely on Romulus, or in the Klingon empire, or even throw in a few about the early Cardassian move to a military state that leads to the conquest of bajor (not necessary to actually show the conquest, we know it happened from DS9, we'll figure it out).
We can see some more about Q and the other Q-like entities, we can tell stores in the far future or far past without invoking time travel. The possibilities are endless if the writers are good.
Take fan suggestions for stories, or suggestions on which series to expand on, possibly spinning off new dedicated series. Use guest writers for stories, take ideas from the books, hell, use fan donations as long as they sign over the rights.
Yes, I was surprised at the negative values, that is encouraging.
I would like to see some hot water or oil solar collectors that use something like a stirling engine rather than photovoltaic solar, since I've read that they tend to take more energy and produce more pollution in their manufacture than they can account for in their useful lifetime, so the net ends up being negative.
A system using hot water/oil collectors and simple parts, while perhaps not optimally efficent, seems like it would be much cheaper, pollution free, and reliable, making it suitable both for retrofitting into existing homes and for inclusion into new construction.
I've often thought about trying to build something like that, but finding good sterling engines is always difficult.
Additionally, I'd be willing to bet that the amount of CO2 released in the past 75 years by human industry is a heck of a lot more than in the 175 previous, but that volcanic releases have stayed about the same. Meaning that in recent years we are probably getting close to matching volcanic ouput.
Thats pretty impressive (in the same way as setting motorcycle land speed records is impressive).
Similar to my idea. I want 20 gmail accounts to which I will email my mp3 collection. I will then write/discover a POP3 filesystem driver so I can mount the accounts and listen to my music from work or home.
And there would be vastly more food if we Americans would quit feeding all the grain to cows. We feed something like 80% of all of our grain to cows, which only convert it to food-mass at a very low ratio.
They also require a huge amount of water and other resources.
OTOH, cattle waste products (everything not eaten by us), such as bone, blood, entrails, etc, are used in a HUGE number of industries which would have to find substitues if we stopped producing all those cows.
Let's make cars based on Stirling engines powered by the radioactive decay of Pu-238
Wow, I'm pro-nuclear power, but not like that:)
Gasoline has an energy density of 44MJ/kg.
Whats the energy density of rice? It always amazing me how little food we animals need to eat to continue functioning and moving around. Can we get some mitocondria-based fuel cell research going?
Once you've broadcast something, it doesn't make sense to try to dictate how your clients use it. By broadcasting it you've given them a copy that they can have for their personal use. They can't rebroadcast it, but they can make copies for their friends (this is legal under US law, just like doing the same thing after recording from the radio).
It doesn't make sense that any Joe with a computer should be able to broadcast music streams without paying some kind of broadcast fee.
People have always recorded music off of the radio, and always will. However, that never made it "legal"
Acutally, it is legal, at least in the US. The RIAA gets a cut of all cassette tape (and possibly all 'Audio' CDR) sales in exchange.
I think I read somewhere that its also legal in Canada, but under a different scheme.
If internet radio streams aren't paying the RIAA, how are they different then using a P2P app that only caches and plays MP3 streams downloaded from other P2P users? Other than the fact that the user gets to choose what to listen to (which I can do by choosing a 'net radio sation anyway).
If I don't put a copy of downloaded MP3 data on my harddisk, am I still violating the copyright?
There is potential for a mod to some P2P apps here. Share your personal collection and let your 'friends' stream songs from their collection to you.
The number of variations of ways to share music and get the same effect kind of points to the absurdity of what the RIAA wants.
Unless they just use some smart software to recognized the actual song, like that cell phone service one of the providers is offering, where you can hold your phone up to a music source and it will identify the music and tell you what it is.
Why not just rip from CDs borrowed from friends (or the library)?
Libraries are great sources, and so are used music and book stores. They will generally buy stuff back after you've had it for a while too. The music ends up not being totally free, but it only costs a couple of bucks per CD, which is better than anywhere else.
I'm not suggesting that the whole thing operate without oversight, or that the functions be set up without some sanity checks.
It would be quite stupid to set up such a system without some way to run 'what if' senarios with detailed impact analysis.
The idea is just to identify the criteria by which we choose these numbers and just put those criteria into the law in a way that a machine can evaluate them, perhaps a segmented function with rules for sanity checking. The root numbers from which other values are calculated would be manipulated as usual and potential feedback or other dangerous conditions would be monitored.
We already get those kinds of chaotic economic fluctuations anyway, its hard to say how making changes to the rules would effect the system without giving it a careful try.
.if you used a formula then your minimum wage might change periodically.
Thats not a problem, its the whole point. Minimum wage already does change periodically, its just that right now enough people have to notice that its not what they want, then pay/convince their representatives to get it bumped up again.
These hardcoded numbers are not just numbers that somebody just plucks out of the air, they have some relationship to cost of living, inflation, and various other figures related to the economy. If you model that relationship with a function (doesn't have to be continious, a segmented function would probably serve the purpose better), then our governments can spend less time fixing the same problems over and over and acutally try to make some progress.
I understand that governing and politics is often more about tweaking imperfect solutions so that they fit real-world problems than it is about actually finding good long-term solutions, and that careful consideration is given to many of these thigns. However, I think that its a poor idea and counter to progress to have the attitude that we as a society are incapable of finding such solutions.
Governing lots of people is hard, and there will always be hard problems in this problem domain, but I don't see anyone trying to apply science and technology to the problems associated with governing. Or, more importantly, I don't see the governers who would benefit from such technology exibiting any interest in it.
As another poster pointed out, this is probably at least partially due to politicians wanting to have lots of parameters they can make a big deal of tweaking so that they can appear needed and get votes. But it doesn't have to be this way. Engineers have been solving problems and automating tasks for decades, and there are always new problems, I think the same thing applies to governing.
That idea goes along with the idea of writing laws using a formal logic scheme whenever possible so that ambiguity in meaning is eliminated and computers can be used to help parse the body of law, which is already so large nearly every citizen must consult a lawyer to really get a definitive answer to a legal question.
I understand that many laws are deliberately vague so that they can be left open to interpretation, and thats fine and a good idea, but there are vastly many more laws that are very specific and could certainly be written such that they can be parsed by a computer to answer specific questions.
Computers can do so much more for us than act as word processors, but I just don't see them used in many parts of many governments as much more than this.
What is it with hardcoding numbers like this in laws anyway? Shouldn't they provide a forumla to calculate the value based on some economic figures that the government could maintain in a big table somewhere? Like minimum wage could be (Imed/2.5) where Imed is the median income for the region, as defined and maintained by some government department.
They could keep track of whatever variables they need to define these numbers so that the values defined in these laws stay resonable over time and through times of high and low economic prosperity.
The law should also define exactly what the various terms in the equation represent and the reasoning behind why they were chosen.
We have all these computers around, we should be using them to improve the way our government works, not just by giving government workers ever-more bloated versions of Word, but by improving the process by which laws are made and maintained.
Right now we hardcode all the values and 'recompile' every couple of years. Its dumb and a waste of taxpayer money and resources.
If it was cheap, we'd probably see some interesting changes in human society. Imagine all the safety equipment, medial services, insurance and associated costs we could get rid of if everone were essentially immune to most accidents and desease. Only the most traumatic of injuries would kill (severe damage to the head would be about the only fatal problem), and minor injuries would be repaired without doctors. No aging, no one fat, heck, not even anyone who is unhappy with their appearance. We could probably have super-olympic level physical performance from everyone.
High speed radiation damage repair, direct conversion of waste products in blood back into useful resources (carbon dioxide converted back into oxygen and sugars). No need for exersize or gravity to keep the body in peak physical condition. No need for external food or oxygen for long periods.
If we didn't need food and air all the time, had extremely long life-spans, and could handle hard vaccum in little more than or PJs, how long would it take before we started colonizing the solar system for real?
There's lots of Sci-Fi written in this vein, its great fun to speculate what the next hundred years could bring. I just hope I'm still around for high capacity direct neural interfaces. And with luck, the singularity:)
Sounds like the biggest commodity that would be left after such an economic shift would be power. Of course we would still need raw materials from which to build stuff (landfill mining anyone?) and we'd still have things like automotive assembly lines for quite a while (large scale manufacturing would probably still be more efficent than nano-assembly, which will likely be both the most versatile and most inefficent manufacturing method ever created).
Wow, you should have gone to a different shop. Guys around here will plug-patch tires (thats remove from vehicle, dismount, clean the inside, install the plug-patch, mount, test, balance and reinstall) for me for about 12 bucks. Takes about half an hour usually, including curing time before mounting the tires.
No doubt they'd be happy to do the easy part of mount-and-balance of 4 tires for me for under $30. But then, racing is pretty popular around here, and nearly every shop (and some peoples home garages) have those big tire mounting machines.
Slashdot Mirror
I've said this before and I'll say it again.
Trek needs a series that tells stories in the Trek universe. It takes as many or as few episodes as it needs to tell the story the way the story should be told. When the story is done, they come up with another one. Switch casts for each story, maybe keep around a few actors who can play different parts, or occasionaly the same character in different stories.
Tell stories set entirely on Romulus, or in the Klingon empire, or even throw in a few about the early Cardassian move to a military state that leads to the conquest of bajor (not necessary to actually show the conquest, we know it happened from DS9, we'll figure it out).
We can see some more about Q and the other Q-like entities, we can tell stores in the far future or far past without invoking time travel. The possibilities are endless if the writers are good.
Take fan suggestions for stories, or suggestions on which series to expand on, possibly spinning off new dedicated series. Use guest writers for stories, take ideas from the books, hell, use fan donations as long as they sign over the rights.
Yes, I was surprised at the negative values, that is encouraging.
I would like to see some hot water or oil solar collectors that use something like a stirling engine rather than photovoltaic solar, since I've read that they tend to take more energy and produce more pollution in their manufacture than they can account for in their useful lifetime, so the net ends up being negative.
A system using hot water/oil collectors and simple parts, while perhaps not optimally efficent, seems like it would be much cheaper, pollution free, and reliable, making it suitable both for retrofitting into existing homes and for inclusion into new construction.
I've often thought about trying to build something like that, but finding good sterling engines is always difficult.
Additionally, I'd be willing to bet that the amount of CO2 released in the past 75 years by human industry is a heck of a lot more than in the 175 previous, but that volcanic releases have stayed about the same. Meaning that in recent years we are probably getting close to matching volcanic ouput.
Thats pretty impressive (in the same way as setting motorcycle land speed records is impressive).
Similar to my idea. I want 20 gmail accounts to which I will email my mp3 collection. I will then write/discover a POP3 filesystem driver so I can mount the accounts and listen to my music from work or home.
And there would be vastly more food if we Americans would quit feeding all the grain to cows. We feed something like 80% of all of our grain to cows, which only convert it to food-mass at a very low ratio.
They also require a huge amount of water and other resources.
OTOH, cattle waste products (everything not eaten by us), such as bone, blood, entrails, etc, are used in a HUGE number of industries which would have to find substitues if we stopped producing all those cows.
I've been trying to find statistics for the total annual global release of volcanic CO2 and other greenhouse gasses for a while, anybody have a link?
I want to know what is the ratio of human-produced to geologicaly produced greenhouse gasses.
Let's make cars based on Stirling engines powered by the radioactive decay of Pu-238
:)
Wow, I'm pro-nuclear power, but not like that
Gasoline has an energy density of 44MJ/kg.
Whats the energy density of rice? It always amazing me how little food we animals need to eat to continue functioning and moving around. Can we get some mitocondria-based fuel cell research going?
Except new music, stations get paid to play the new stuff. Payola I think they call it.
But yes, that was my point about internet broadcasters not having to pay any royalties.
I'm not sure how it's piracy.
Once you've broadcast something, it doesn't make sense to try to dictate how your clients use it. By broadcasting it you've given them a copy that they can have for their personal use. They can't rebroadcast it, but they can make copies for their friends (this is legal under US law, just like doing the same thing after recording from the radio).
It doesn't make sense that any Joe with a computer should be able to broadcast music streams without paying some kind of broadcast fee.
People have always recorded music off of the radio, and always will. However, that never made it "legal"
Acutally, it is legal, at least in the US. The RIAA gets a cut of all cassette tape (and possibly all 'Audio' CDR) sales in exchange.
I think I read somewhere that its also legal in Canada, but under a different scheme.
If internet radio streams aren't paying the RIAA, how are they different then using a P2P app that only caches and plays MP3 streams downloaded from other P2P users? Other than the fact that the user gets to choose what to listen to (which I can do by choosing a 'net radio sation anyway).
If I don't put a copy of downloaded MP3 data on my harddisk, am I still violating the copyright?
There is potential for a mod to some P2P apps here. Share your personal collection and let your 'friends' stream songs from their collection to you.
The number of variations of ways to share music and get the same effect kind of points to the absurdity of what the RIAA wants.
If the watermark can be added, it can be removed.
Unless they just use some smart software to recognized the actual song, like that cell phone service one of the providers is offering, where you can hold your phone up to a music source and it will identify the music and tell you what it is.
Why not just rip from CDs borrowed from friends (or the library)?
Libraries are great sources, and so are used music and book stores. They will generally buy stuff back after you've had it for a while too. The music ends up not being totally free, but it only costs a couple of bucks per CD, which is better than anywhere else.
I think that is set up to take into people who don't work 40 hours a week.
I'm not suggesting that the whole thing operate without oversight, or that the functions be set up without some sanity checks.
It would be quite stupid to set up such a system without some way to run 'what if' senarios with detailed impact analysis.
The idea is just to identify the criteria by which we choose these numbers and just put those criteria into the law in a way that a machine can evaluate them, perhaps a segmented function with rules for sanity checking. The root numbers from which other values are calculated would be manipulated as usual and potential feedback or other dangerous conditions would be monitored.
We already get those kinds of chaotic economic fluctuations anyway, its hard to say how making changes to the rules would effect the system without giving it a careful try.
.if you used a formula then your minimum wage might change periodically.
Thats not a problem, its the whole point. Minimum wage already does change periodically, its just that right now enough people have to notice that its not what they want, then pay/convince their representatives to get it bumped up again.
These hardcoded numbers are not just numbers that somebody just plucks out of the air, they have some relationship to cost of living, inflation, and various other figures related to the economy. If you model that relationship with a function (doesn't have to be continious, a segmented function would probably serve the purpose better), then our governments can spend less time fixing the same problems over and over and acutally try to make some progress.
I understand that governing and politics is often more about tweaking imperfect solutions so that they fit real-world problems than it is about actually finding good long-term solutions, and that careful consideration is given to many of these thigns. However, I think that its a poor idea and counter to progress to have the attitude that we as a society are incapable of finding such solutions.
Governing lots of people is hard, and there will always be hard problems in this problem domain, but I don't see anyone trying to apply science and technology to the problems associated with governing. Or, more importantly, I don't see the governers who would benefit from such technology exibiting any interest in it.
As another poster pointed out, this is probably at least partially due to politicians wanting to have lots of parameters they can make a big deal of tweaking so that they can appear needed and get votes. But it doesn't have to be this way. Engineers have been solving problems and automating tasks for decades, and there are always new problems, I think the same thing applies to governing.
That idea goes along with the idea of writing laws using a formal logic scheme whenever possible so that ambiguity in meaning is eliminated and computers can be used to help parse the body of law, which is already so large nearly every citizen must consult a lawyer to really get a definitive answer to a legal question.
I understand that many laws are deliberately vague so that they can be left open to interpretation, and thats fine and a good idea, but there are vastly many more laws that are very specific and could certainly be written such that they can be parsed by a computer to answer specific questions.
Computers can do so much more for us than act as word processors, but I just don't see them used in many parts of many governments as much more than this.
It could go either way. In the case of taxes hard-coded numbers could end up screwing people at the low income end.
Sounds like a variation on the Prisoners' Dilemma.
I wonder if the alleged Microsoft managers actually understood the strategy.
If that were true I don't see why GW and his flunk.. uh, associates would have spent a year trying to get this pushed through.
What discrepancy? This is government math, it adds up just right.
What is it with hardcoding numbers like this in laws anyway? Shouldn't they provide a forumla to calculate the value based on some economic figures that the government could maintain in a big table somewhere? Like minimum wage could be (Imed/2.5) where Imed is the median income for the region, as defined and maintained by some government department.
They could keep track of whatever variables they need to define these numbers so that the values defined in these laws stay resonable over time and through times of high and low economic prosperity.
The law should also define exactly what the various terms in the equation represent and the reasoning behind why they were chosen.
We have all these computers around, we should be using them to improve the way our government works, not just by giving government workers ever-more bloated versions of Word, but by improving the process by which laws are made and maintained.
Right now we hardcode all the values and 'recompile' every couple of years. Its dumb and a waste of taxpayer money and resources.
Low-Rate TCP-Targeted Denial of Service Attacks
(The Shrew vs. the Mice and Elephants)
A short response
If it was cheap, we'd probably see some interesting changes in human society. Imagine all the safety equipment, medial services, insurance and associated costs we could get rid of if everone were essentially immune to most accidents and desease. Only the most traumatic of injuries would kill (severe damage to the head would be about the only fatal problem), and minor injuries would be repaired without doctors. No aging, no one fat, heck, not even anyone who is unhappy with their appearance. We could probably have super-olympic level physical performance from everyone.
:)
High speed radiation damage repair, direct conversion of waste products in blood back into useful resources (carbon dioxide converted back into oxygen and sugars). No need for exersize or gravity to keep the body in peak physical condition. No need for external food or oxygen for long periods.
If we didn't need food and air all the time, had extremely long life-spans, and could handle hard vaccum in little more than or PJs, how long would it take before we started colonizing the solar system for real?
There's lots of Sci-Fi written in this vein, its great fun to speculate what the next hundred years could bring. I just hope I'm still around for high capacity direct neural interfaces. And with luck, the singularity
Sounds like the biggest commodity that would be left after such an economic shift would be power. Of course we would still need raw materials from which to build stuff (landfill mining anyone?) and we'd still have things like automotive assembly lines for quite a while (large scale manufacturing would probably still be more efficent than nano-assembly, which will likely be both the most versatile and most inefficent manufacturing method ever created).
Wow, you should have gone to a different shop. Guys around here will plug-patch tires (thats remove from vehicle, dismount, clean the inside, install the plug-patch, mount, test, balance and reinstall) for me for about 12 bucks. Takes about half an hour usually, including curing time before mounting the tires.
No doubt they'd be happy to do the easy part of mount-and-balance of 4 tires for me for under $30. But then, racing is pretty popular around here, and nearly every shop (and some peoples home garages) have those big tire mounting machines.