That's easy enough to combat. The music industry would lobby to make it illegal or against home broadband AUP's to route traffic for virtual networks, and they'd probably get it too.
Everyday I talk to tens of people from all around the globe, thanks to the internet. I feel silly when the world 'war' is mentioned, because I do not have any real differences with other people
Bit of a selection bias there, don't you think?
In case you haven't noticed, there are a hell of a lot of people out there who don't use the internet, and they don't necessarily think the same way as the internet-using people you talk to.
IMHO though, your mostly right, probably 99% of the population of the world couldn't care less what everybody else is doing, as long as they play nice.
Its funny how we can always come up with money to kill, but there's never enough money for science.
Not strange, really. See, with the military the President can order them somewhere and expend a bunch of resources before he gets money. After he's got them over a barrel, then he can ask Congress for the money to pay for it. If they decline, they look like the bad guys.
For science, you have to get the money before you do the work, and, generally speaking, nobody shoots or blows up the electorates kids and siblings because science isn't getting funding. When you don't fund the military they can't provide armor and weapons for soldiers who are already stuck in a hostile country.
That is not true at all. You are making the assumption that humans biology is constant. It does not have to be so.
We could colonize many places by modifying our bodies in a few ways. Radiation hardening, skin hardened against continious operation in hard vacuum, implanted electricaly or nuclear powered regeneration of blood waste products (CO2 and etc) into O2 and sugars, updated bone-density adaptation mechanisms, etc.
By removing the need for extensive life-support hardware humans could essentially live and work nearly unprotected on the lunar surface as well as in orbit. Cultivation of foodstuff would be drasticly reduced in exchange for generation of electrical power or mining of nuclear sources (if the body were hardened against radiation it might become practical to carry a small internal nuclear power source).
Sure it's currently stuff that is currently way, way beyond medical technology, but its not implausable. I would imagine that the biggest objection would be that adding heritable traits such as these would de-humanize us (the result would almost certainly be considered a new species of human), but I don't see that as a necessarily bad thing.
All this thing is doing is spinning the blades like a normal fan to give you your ability to work the fluid (air). Then, the spinning shaft is vibrated axially at whatever frequency to give you the "sound" at that frequency.
Nope. If you'd do a little more research you'll find that it uses variable pitch blades, like on a helicopter or fancy plane prop. The blades spin and the pitch of the blades is adjusted to control the velocity and direction of the breeze. So the fan blade can very quickly adjust the pressure in the room.
It's a cool (and not new) idea, and I'll be curious to see how well they can get it to work. I'm sure there are numerous technical challenges. I look forward to reviews of the system playing something other than test tones, and the final retail price.
Interesting idea, I wonder how well it works in very quiet installations (i.e., is there lots of fan noise?) and if its useful to use it in large bass horns.
In the series the reavers were one of those villans that sounded cool for the first couple episodes, then you find out that they are basicly just people that have been traumatized (for example by being forced to watch the slaughter of their crewmates). They don't really have a sensible motivation, and their only advantage over regular people is that they evidently don't care if they die.
Pretty stupid villians really, I was disappointed when they revealed more about them in the series. I hope to be able to enjoy the movie regardless.
Expensive Sports Car -> Affordable Sports Car $3000 Cell Phone -> $0-$500 Cell Phone Jet Plane -> Cessna
If you have anything that classifies as a sports car, a $500 cell phone or especially a non-experimental human-carrying aircraft of any sort, you classify as 'rich' to most of the population of the United States of America.
Not mega-ultra-rich, but rich.
Most of America drives a sedan, compact or minivan, carries a $50 cell phone, and drives everywhere because flying coach is usually too damned expensive (with the exception of single-person ~1000> mile trips where no rental car is needed at the other end).
So if we can make computers that can actually think well enough to do the design, then getting design done faster just requires better computers. I think it's safe to assume that computers will continue to increase in power. Whether or not they'll become "intelligent" is harder to predict, but lets say for the sake of the singularity that they do.
Since evolutionary 'design' of items works pretty well in practice (as evidenced by life and our experiments with computer based GA design), it is not necessary for computers to be intelligent in order to quickly produce good designs. The only need to be able to simulate reality well enough to evolve physical designs that work well when constructed in the real world.
There's lots of stuff available in the earth, but extracting it, even if it becomes easy, will most likely be rather destructive. The solution is to make spaceflight reliable enough that we can mine other places, asteroids and the like. Although that seems to me to be a short term solution, because most things in space are pretty far away. Unless there's some sort of major star trek-ish breakthrough in propulsion, it's never going to be all that simple.
With fusion power available mining in space is easier. While moving stuff is still going to be slow, there is plenty of stuff available. One idea is to set up mining of stuff nearby for short-lead supplies (on the moon for example, or possibly some Earth-crossing bodies). This is expensive, but fast enough to yeild a profit in the short term.
While doing this, start moving more stuff from other places (distant astroids and moons) on slow, low-energy transfer orbits, so that they will be in place in the future (decades or centuries from now). These will not be accessable at all for a long time, but they will be much cheaper when they are available, and as long as the pipeline is full, it doesn't matter how long it takes for the goods to arrive, as long as they keep coming. Like water in Roman aquaducts, it doesn't matter if it takes days to get from the source to the bath, as long as it keeps flowing.
This is true, but according to some nutrition has a huge impact on hormone levels and properly managed nutrition can result in much better growth hormone levels into adulthood. You won't necessarily live all that much longer, but you will be much more healthy and able-bodied in the time that you do have. I'd rather live with a vigorous, healthy body for a shorter time than live longer with a failing, broken body.
The book Natural Hormonal Enhancement is a good refrenced with all of its research sources cited. The diet recomended is based on what primitive human ancestors probably ate, frequent, mostly low carb, medium- to high-fat, with an occasional (1 every 2-4 days) high carb meal.
The diet is designed to work with the human hormone system to reduce catabolic (tissue-reducing) hormone production and increase anabolic (tissue-building) hormone production. Numerous studies investigating links between food intake and hormone levels are cited as evidence. Overall it seems to work quite well (I've been using it for about 8 weeks).
Seems like any scheme that doesn't have your legs accelerating a mass when you try to walk will feel different than reality. For gaming purposes I'd rather see an augmented reality setup like a lasertag arena. Lots of features like stairs and ramps that you'd actually have to walk on, with environmental details added digitally.
In a large enough arena it would be easy to overlap features such that the virtual world could be much larger than the arena and features like stairs and ramps could be reused (although if it was multiplayer you'd have to be careful not to run into other players who were not in your virtual area, but who were in your physical area).
Even simple augmented reality setups would be a great addition to arena games, or even in places like Disneyworld. Imagine being able to wear a set of glasses that would overlay info about points of interest, map info, 'walk-to' directions to find other members of your party, etc. I'm sure people would pay for that sort of stuff.
Augmented reality systems already work well enough for use in commercial enviroments, I think both Honda and BMW use them for providing documentation to workers as they work. Would be great to see them make their way into the consumer market.
Here's another link, a paper about clock-powered CMOS. Most of the university research I've seen on this kind of stuff is this sort of clock-powered CMOS.
Into heat as the charge is dumped to ground, generally. Basicly you charge up a cap to indicate a logical 1 (or zero, if you prefer). When you want to make it a zero, you dump the charge to ground and you lose the energy, increasing the local entropy.
There are designs and a few working prototypes that recycle some of that energy, but they are more complex than regular chips. Basicly the idea is that in a given processor you'll have a bunch of gates turning on and off at any given time, so you can save some power by dumping charges from gates going from 1 to 0 to gates going from 0 to 1. Its really a heck of a lot more complicated than that though.
The field is called reversable computingand has a lot of potential to reduce power requirements of logic devices.
The self checkout stands here in Omaha (Walmart and Hy-Vee chains, I don't think Target has them yet) are mostly unattended. Someone watches them, but if you are paying with cash, walmart card, credit or debit they only come over and bug you if you have a bag that might contain unscanned items, or you have a problem with the stupid bag scale.
If you pay with a check it sends you over to the manager to pay.
I don't understand why RFID is useful for these systems. Magstripes are pretty robust and can contain the same kind of info. If they are going to improve the cards, they need to turn them into SecurID cards that generate a new number for every transaction. Heck, I'd even pay them to buy a SecurID-like card that I could use with their system. Bonus points if it includes an option to put all my cards into the same device so I can just carry the one device and leave the rest at home.
What really struck me is how many of the people of New Orleans decided to steal from each other instead of help each other.
Well, I expect that many of the people running off with luxury items couldn't care less about anyone else. They were probably poor to start with and see this as a chance to gain a few luxury items that would be stolen by someone else if they themselves don't.
I do wonder how many businesses will move anything not stolen into the back room, claim a 100% loss on insurance and then sell the stuff thats left off the books in an effort to make some more money.
It's not right, but having lived with people like that for a while, I do understand it. They are ruled by their desires and they have never had the resources to develop generosity. They are the people that make the ideas in Brave New World look interesting.
It can be done, after a fasion. The complex structures that are removed can't be replaced, but with a 12-18 months of sustained effort the skin folds can be replicated. The result can be very difficult to distinguish from the original, even for a doctor.
There are a number of web pages that deal with the subject.
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That's easy enough to combat. The music industry would lobby to make it illegal or against home broadband AUP's to route traffic for virtual networks, and they'd probably get it too.
Good to see people doing this work, but consider paying someone to customize the Mambo template, the default is a little tacky.
Everyday I talk to tens of people from all around the globe, thanks to the internet. I feel silly when the world 'war' is mentioned, because I do not have any real differences with other people
Bit of a selection bias there, don't you think?
In case you haven't noticed, there are a hell of a lot of people out there who don't use the internet, and they don't necessarily think the same way as the internet-using people you talk to.
IMHO though, your mostly right, probably 99% of the population of the world couldn't care less what everybody else is doing, as long as they play nice.
Its funny how we can always come up with money to kill, but there's never enough money for science.
Not strange, really. See, with the military the President can order them somewhere and expend a bunch of resources before he gets money. After he's got them over a barrel, then he can ask Congress for the money to pay for it. If they decline, they look like the bad guys.
For science, you have to get the money before you do the work, and, generally speaking, nobody shoots or blows up the electorates kids and siblings because science isn't getting funding. When you don't fund the military they can't provide armor and weapons for soldiers who are already stuck in a hostile country.
That is not true at all. You are making the assumption that humans biology is constant. It does not have to be so.
We could colonize many places by modifying our bodies in a few ways. Radiation hardening, skin hardened against continious operation in hard vacuum, implanted electricaly or nuclear powered regeneration of blood waste products (CO2 and etc) into O2 and sugars, updated bone-density adaptation mechanisms, etc.
By removing the need for extensive life-support hardware humans could essentially live and work nearly unprotected on the lunar surface as well as in orbit. Cultivation of foodstuff would be drasticly reduced in exchange for generation of electrical power or mining of nuclear sources (if the body were hardened against radiation it might become practical to carry a small internal nuclear power source).
Sure it's currently stuff that is currently way, way beyond medical technology, but its not implausable. I would imagine that the biggest objection would be that adding heritable traits such as these would de-humanize us (the result would almost certainly be considered a new species of human), but I don't see that as a necessarily bad thing.
Here, I fixed your sig:
Hydrogen fueled cars aren't the answer. Cheap, clean, non-sequestered-carbon-based fuel production is.
All this thing is doing is spinning the blades like a normal fan to give you your ability to work the fluid (air). Then, the spinning shaft is vibrated axially at whatever frequency to give you the "sound" at that frequency.
Nope. If you'd do a little more research you'll find that it uses variable pitch blades, like on a helicopter or fancy plane prop. The blades spin and the pitch of the blades is adjusted to control the velocity and direction of the breeze. So the fan blade can very quickly adjust the pressure in the room.
It's a cool (and not new) idea, and I'll be curious to see how well they can get it to work. I'm sure there are numerous technical challenges. I look forward to reviews of the system playing something other than test tones, and the final retail price.
Interesting idea, I wonder how well it works in very quiet installations (i.e., is there lots of fan noise?) and if its useful to use it in large bass horns.
Cool, thanks. I would not have thought to look in the shop for it.
As a geek with a CNC mill and a couple of electronic digital clock projects completed, this is a very attractive project.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any detailed plans for the construction of the elements of the clock.
Anybody see any construction details?
In the series the reavers were one of those villans that sounded cool for the first couple episodes, then you find out that they are basicly just people that have been traumatized (for example by being forced to watch the slaughter of their crewmates). They don't really have a sensible motivation, and their only advantage over regular people is that they evidently don't care if they die.
Pretty stupid villians really, I was disappointed when they revealed more about them in the series. I hope to be able to enjoy the movie regardless.
All numbers in thousands. I bought in mid-2002. My house was $275
Well sure, but how much was the time machine?
Expensive Sports Car -> Affordable Sports Car
$3000 Cell Phone -> $0-$500 Cell Phone
Jet Plane -> Cessna
If you have anything that classifies as a sports car, a $500 cell phone or especially a non-experimental human-carrying aircraft of any sort, you classify as 'rich' to most of the population of the United States of America.
Not mega-ultra-rich, but rich.
Most of America drives a sedan, compact or minivan, carries a $50 cell phone, and drives everywhere because flying coach is usually too damned expensive (with the exception of single-person ~1000> mile trips where no rental car is needed at the other end).
So if we can make computers that can actually think well enough to do the design, then getting design done faster just requires better computers. I think it's safe to assume that computers will continue to increase in power. Whether or not they'll become "intelligent" is harder to predict, but lets say for the sake of the singularity that they do.
Since evolutionary 'design' of items works pretty well in practice (as evidenced by life and our experiments with computer based GA design), it is not necessary for computers to be intelligent in order to quickly produce good designs. The only need to be able to simulate reality well enough to evolve physical designs that work well when constructed in the real world.
There's lots of stuff available in the earth, but extracting it, even if it becomes easy, will most likely be rather destructive. The solution is to make spaceflight reliable enough that we can mine other places, asteroids and the like. Although that seems to me to be a short term solution, because most things in space are pretty far away. Unless there's some sort of major star trek-ish breakthrough in propulsion, it's never going to be all that simple.
With fusion power available mining in space is easier. While moving stuff is still going to be slow, there is plenty of stuff available. One idea is to set up mining of stuff nearby for short-lead supplies (on the moon for example, or possibly some Earth-crossing bodies). This is expensive, but fast enough to yeild a profit in the short term.
While doing this, start moving more stuff from other places (distant astroids and moons) on slow, low-energy transfer orbits, so that they will be in place in the future (decades or centuries from now). These will not be accessable at all for a long time, but they will be much cheaper when they are available, and as long as the pipeline is full, it doesn't matter how long it takes for the goods to arrive, as long as they keep coming. Like water in Roman aquaducts, it doesn't matter if it takes days to get from the source to the bath, as long as it keeps flowing.
This is true, but according to some nutrition has a huge impact on hormone levels and properly managed nutrition can result in much better growth hormone levels into adulthood. You won't necessarily live all that much longer, but you will be much more healthy and able-bodied in the time that you do have. I'd rather live with a vigorous, healthy body for a shorter time than live longer with a failing, broken body.
The book Natural Hormonal Enhancement is a good refrenced with all of its research sources cited. The diet recomended is based on what primitive human ancestors probably ate, frequent, mostly low carb, medium- to high-fat, with an occasional (1 every 2-4 days) high carb meal.
The diet is designed to work with the human hormone system to reduce catabolic (tissue-reducing) hormone production and increase anabolic (tissue-building) hormone production. Numerous studies investigating links between food intake and hormone levels are cited as evidence. Overall it seems to work quite well (I've been using it for about 8 weeks).
Yes, what we need is of course a Mood Organ as described in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Cool idea. I wonder if diamagnetic levitation? would be a useful principle for controlling the track levitation.
Seems like any scheme that doesn't have your legs accelerating a mass when you try to walk will feel different than reality. For gaming purposes I'd rather see an augmented reality setup like a lasertag arena. Lots of features like stairs and ramps that you'd actually have to walk on, with environmental details added digitally.
In a large enough arena it would be easy to overlap features such that the virtual world could be much larger than the arena and features like stairs and ramps could be reused (although if it was multiplayer you'd have to be careful not to run into other players who were not in your virtual area, but who were in your physical area).
Even simple augmented reality setups would be a great addition to arena games, or even in places like Disneyworld. Imagine being able to wear a set of glasses that would overlay info about points of interest, map info, 'walk-to' directions to find other members of your party, etc. I'm sure people would pay for that sort of stuff.
Augmented reality systems already work well enough for use in commercial enviroments, I think both Honda and BMW use them for providing documentation to workers as they work. Would be great to see them make their way into the consumer market.
Here's another link, a paper about clock-powered CMOS. Most of the university research I've seen on this kind of stuff is this sort of clock-powered CMOS.
Into heat as the charge is dumped to ground, generally. Basicly you charge up a cap to indicate a logical 1 (or zero, if you prefer). When you want to make it a zero, you dump the charge to ground and you lose the energy, increasing the local entropy.
There are designs and a few working prototypes that recycle some of that energy, but they are more complex than regular chips. Basicly the idea is that in a given processor you'll have a bunch of gates turning on and off at any given time, so you can save some power by dumping charges from gates going from 1 to 0 to gates going from 0 to 1. Its really a heck of a lot more complicated than that though.
The field is called reversable computingand has a lot of potential to reduce power requirements of logic devices.
The self checkout stands here in Omaha (Walmart and Hy-Vee chains, I don't think Target has them yet) are mostly unattended. Someone watches them, but if you are paying with cash, walmart card, credit or debit they only come over and bug you if you have a bag that might contain unscanned items, or you have a problem with the stupid bag scale.
If you pay with a check it sends you over to the manager to pay.
I don't understand why RFID is useful for these systems. Magstripes are pretty robust and can contain the same kind of info. If they are going to improve the cards, they need to turn them into SecurID cards that generate a new number for every transaction. Heck, I'd even pay them to buy a SecurID-like card that I could use with their system. Bonus points if it includes an option to put all my cards into the same device so I can just carry the one device and leave the rest at home.
I've tried linux a few times, but it still doesn't have enough commercial software to pirate.
I think you're going to know when you install a program unless you have malware
Not if you are using a shared system. Granted, not all that many people do that, but I suppose thats why its there.
What really struck me is how many of the people of New Orleans decided to steal from each other instead of help each other.
Well, I expect that many of the people running off with luxury items couldn't care less about anyone else. They were probably poor to start with and see this as a chance to gain a few luxury items that would be stolen by someone else if they themselves don't.
I do wonder how many businesses will move anything not stolen into the back room, claim a 100% loss on insurance and then sell the stuff thats left off the books in an effort to make some more money.
It's not right, but having lived with people like that for a while, I do understand it. They are ruled by their desires and they have never had the resources to develop generosity. They are the people that make the ideas in Brave New World look interesting.
It can be done, after a fasion. The complex structures that are removed can't be replaced, but with a 12-18 months of sustained effort the skin folds can be replicated. The result can be very difficult to distinguish from the original, even for a doctor.
There are a number of web pages that deal with the subject.