Well, Im 19 now - I don't remember what age I was when I first saw nethack - about 12 maybe. A friend of the same age introduced me - no idea how he was introduced.
I've played it in binges ever since, not because its oldskool, but because its a cool game, probably more detailed than anything else I've ever played. Ascended my first character last year - yay.
Given an infinite amount of processing power and memory, could someone "solve" the game of chess?
Certainly, given an infinite amount of processing power and storage space. But then, you can't just ring up Dell and say "Hi, I want an infitite amount of processors by next Tuesday"...And even if you could, it might not do you all that much good - You see, if you do a few calculations it turns out that there are more possible chess positions than there are atoms in the universe. Which might prove problematic when you are trying to store them.
Of course there are ways go about "solving" chess that don't require you to enumerate every possible board, but they are still way beyond the reach of classical computing, probably forever. Quantum computing might be a different story, but we'll just have to wait and see how that one pans out..
No, no you've got it all backwards! Loose the Vorbis bit - I mean "I've got this cool new Ogg player" rolls of the tongue far more smoothly than "Vorbis player" to my mind.
Plus, if you know the origin of "Vorbis" - from "Small Gods" by Terry Pratchett (Vorbis a very evil, twisted individual), then it feels like a really incongrous name for a file format.
I think if people started using it a lot, Ogg is the natural shortening.
This isn't just a plug like another cynical poster suggested. This really is a good article worth reading. Good artists-point-of-view insight into the whole Napster/access to content debate.Quote:
Now you don't need to be sponsored and paid for by some big media company to get your work in front of millions of people. The old model was that you had to be able to convince a bunch of people with lots of money that you were worth promoting before you even had a chance to see if people would respond to your work on a grand scale. This lead, for the longest time, to the sad state where only a small number of people decided what the public was going to see. Also, since these same people convinced all of us over the years that ONLY people that they felt were good enough to promote were worthy of entertaining us, that we should not waste our time entertaining ourselves - only paid for entertainment was worthy entertainment. Worked great till the net came along.
OK - your criticisms, are fair enough - but if you look at the facts a bit closer, a space elevator is really orders of magnitude more expensive and difficult than this elevated runway idea.
Firstly, you don't need flawless diamond - ordinary commerical artificial diamond will do fine. As for cost, well nanotubes are a bit pricy themselves - clocking in at a cool $500 per gram - so that gives you a projected cost of 33,000 trillion for an evelator at present. Just for the material, with no transport of construction costs. Steep.
The thing I love about this guy's proposal is that its close to being feasible with current tech. With existing construction methods using steel you could raise a tower 20 kilometres tall. With diamond 300km is no problem.
Obviosly, neither the elevator or this are practical while the cost of advanced materioals like nanotubes of synthetic diamond remain at current levels, but to quote from the article:
If an Apollo style (and -cost) project could do for diamond what the original one did for electronics, we could build the tower in the next decade or so. Molecular manufacturing, even of a fairly unsophisticated form, could make it economical. A mature nanotechnology would put towers within the capabilities of private enterprise, and make space travel cheap.
Materials technology are going to provide us with the right stuff sooner or later, and all Im saying is that this project is probably in the sooner catagory, while the space elevator is most definately a later thing.
As for damage, well, the mass of the elevator falling from geosyncronous orbit is going to create a thermonuclear size event. The ocean is no help, because it then creates a mega-tsumani. Some other posters have a nice outline of the possibilities. By comparison, this thing wouldn't make a dent.
I think you should read the article a little more carefully - its not a wall, exactly, its supported on stilts. Quote for the article:
The overall structure could be openwork like a radio tower, and could have approximately 60 footprints 10 km apart on the ground - if we set aside a hectare for each foot, they only occupy 0.02% of the land under the tower. The footprint foundations would each bear the weight of a small office building, no great technical challenge.
For those who use different units, a heactare is a square 100m on each side, or about 2.47 arces. So these feet are really pretty titchy.
So, its not going to act like a wall/sail at all, and I doubt its not going to affect the atmosphere much more than a sky scraper, really - cetainly no more than a space elevator.
As for the obvious problem of how to get the diamond, well, its much eassier than to get a billion tonnes of 40,000km carbon nanotubes into orbit. Even the easiest part of that - capturing a carbon rich asteroid, is way beyond us at the moment, and poses an extinction level risk.
I think this thing is really a much more realistic medium-term possibility, and a damn good idea.
Ok - The space elevator is a lovely concept, but it's only just possible with the theoretical limits of where we can go with materials technology - so its going to be pie in the sky (or lack there-of) for a long time yet.
There are some variations on the idea though,like this one, that are close to being possible with today's technology, and can even be provisionally costed. Basically the idea is to construct an elevated runway about 100km up, and use mass drivers to hurl stuff into orbit. At that altitude the saving from air resistance is huge and mass drivers become very efficient
At this stage, NASA speanding serious time thinking about space elevators is probably no more useful than daydreaming. Thinking about this kind of thing is probably more productiove though, becuase something might come of it in the medium term, and its almost as efficient as an evelator anyway - with the decided advantage of not being able to collapse and strangle the planet.
(Since I heard about this from a NASA researcher, maybe Im being a little harsh to accuse them of daydreaming)
Wow - I just been reading a little more on their site. They're futher along than I though. This is a quote from an confrence where they demoed their system:
Three visitors experimented ABI. In less than 1 hour of training they achieved rather good performances. In particular, a lady was able to write something without errors on an on-screen keyboard and play the computer game Pac-Man. This confirms the adaptive capabilities of ABI.
Playing PacMan qith your mind! This is just too much for me!
Further Reading
on
Think And Click
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There's quite a bit of this stuff going on - Just last week I was talking to the guy in the Engineering department here that has a project doing something similar. I can't seem to find his site at the moment, but the ABI project is another similar effort with a nice, informative site at about the same level of development.
The actual reseacrh described in the Yahoo article using implanted electrodes seems a bit strange - though the claim to have identified a few individual neurons is interesting.
Most of the other groups are working with stick-on electrodes. At the moment all they can do is move a mosue around a screen and click, but progress seems to be good - Correct recognition is around 70% after 5 one-hour sessions, which sounds impressive to me. The big obstacle to getting this into service for real people with disabilities is that the hardware is currently a bit chunky, especially the EEG machine. But we all know what happens to hardware, very, very quickly.
Oh - and, yes, the guy i talked to says the thing that secretlty drives him is eventually using it to play Quake. (Wonderful thing, altrusim)
Now wouldn't that be cool.(Unfortuantely you have to shave your head, I think!)
Um.. you are wrong, so I'll correct you. "Glow in the dark" stuff glows because a chemical reaction is happening, and generating light. This is something completely different. These guys actually brought light to a hault, so that a pulse of light stopped in the crystal
I think the (possible myth?) is that his original description in his story was so good that years later when someone else came to try and patent satellites, they found they couldn't because of the story was such an accurate description that it was considered a sort of "prior art" on par with a scientific paper.I'm not entirely sure to what extent this is really true.
Considering what's happened to the patent office since then, though, I could probably waltz down to the patent office tomorrow, and they'd have no trouble handing me a patent on staellites. Or large orbiting mind control lasers for that matter.
As in the story where everyone depends on calculators, and doing math by hand is revolutionary (sorry if I forgot the name).
Its called "The Feeling of Power", I think. It included in several of his collections. He originally wrote it as a joke, but it now has a grain of truth to it.
Just on that last bit - Asimov may have popularized "robot" in its current sense, but he didn't invent the word - he says so himself in a few of his introductions. Its originally from a Czechslovakian play written around 1900 or so. It means "slave"/"menial worker" in Czech.
I live on the other side of the Atlantic, so I don't hear any of the rhetoric - I just see the decisions this man makes, and from what I can see, he is behaving criminally.
Firstly, the US pays some of the lowest energy prices on the planet. Over here we pay almost three times more for our petrol. Maybe higher prices over there would be a good thing. They might force America to consider how much energy it uses and maybe think about efficiency for a change.
Secondly, you have no energy crisis in any real terms. That thing in California is a problem of administrative incompetence and bad planning, and in no way related to poor energy supplies.
Lastly, the things Bush have proposed are almost unbelievably irresponsible. Even forgetting about CO2 concerns, it is a fact that within the next 30-40 years, oil supply is going to fall behind demand, and gradually dry up altogether. Coal will follow not much later. It is foolish in the extreme to put a large part of investment in new energy infrastructure into fossil fuels - if you do you are going to run hard into a brick wall.
Even forgetting about this - because listening to Bush there is no way he will consider a non-fossil fuel based solution - the fact that he seems opposed to even basic environmental precautions like scrubber systems and good power plant location is incredible. He is such a bought-man that the fact that he seems to retain some respectability and support is hard to understand.
I hope that for the good of the rest of the world - and the US too - that his plans never make it through congress in any recognisable form.
I don't live in the States, so I'm quite curious about this impression that I'm seeing quite strongly on Slashsdot - i.e. that a large proportion of US 'technology enthusaists' really fit the profile of " poor hygiene, little or no conversation skills and attitudes (for instance know-it-all-ism) that are off-putting. That a huge number of them actually are the sterotypical akward social outcasts (during their school yeras anyway) so beloved of Jon Katz.
Is this really a fair representation of the situation in America? Personally, I live in Ireland, and I know a fairly large number of equivalent "geeks" over here - While I'd certainly say that they're a bit "bookish"/slightly introverted, they are almost without exception also well-balanced individuals with other intrests and reasonable social skills, and good experiences of school.
Am I just getting a skewed impression of the US from reading Slashdot/Katz, or is the social situation really very different over there?
This is a great ruling in principal - I think everyone agrees that the basic principal of being free to view or write code, regardless of purpose is a healthy idea - provided you make fair use of that code. But I think classifying source as "speech" is the wrong way to go about securing that right. Its going to lead to all sorts of redicilious things like source code falling under libel laws,etc.
Slashdot Mirror
#ifdefDEBUG + 'world/enough' + 'time' (funky title!)
I've heard about it, and I'd really like to read it. Happen to remember where you found it?
Thanks.
I've played it in binges ever since, not because its oldskool, but because its a cool game, probably more detailed than anything else I've ever played. Ascended my first character last year - yay.
Certainly, given an infinite amount of processing power and storage space. But then, you can't just ring up Dell and say "Hi, I want an infitite amount of processors by next Tuesday"...And even if you could, it might not do you all that much good - You see, if you do a few calculations it turns out that there are more possible chess positions than there are atoms in the universe. Which might prove problematic when you are trying to store them.
Of course there are ways go about "solving" chess that don't require you to enumerate every possible board, but they are still way beyond the reach of classical computing, probably forever. Quantum computing might be a different story, but we'll just have to wait and see how that one pans out..
Plus, if you know the origin of "Vorbis" - from "Small Gods" by Terry Pratchett (Vorbis a very evil, twisted individual), then it feels like a really incongrous name for a file format.
I think if people started using it a lot, Ogg is the natural shortening.
That is all.
Firstly, you don't need flawless diamond - ordinary commerical artificial diamond will do fine. As for cost, well nanotubes are a bit pricy themselves - clocking in at a cool $500 per gram - so that gives you a projected cost of 33,000 trillion for an evelator at present. Just for the material, with no transport of construction costs. Steep.
The thing I love about this guy's proposal is that its close to being feasible with current tech. With existing construction methods using steel you could raise a tower 20 kilometres tall. With diamond 300km is no problem.
Obviosly, neither the elevator or this are practical while the cost of advanced materioals like nanotubes of synthetic diamond remain at current levels, but to quote from the article:
Materials technology are going to provide us with the right stuff sooner or later, and all Im saying is that this project is probably in the sooner catagory, while the space elevator is most definately a later thing.
As for damage, well, the mass of the elevator falling from geosyncronous orbit is going to create a thermonuclear size event. The ocean is no help, because it then creates a mega-tsumani. Some other posters have a nice outline of the possibilities. By comparison, this thing wouldn't make a dent.
For those who use different units, a heactare is a square 100m on each side, or about 2.47 arces. So these feet are really pretty titchy. So, its not going to act like a wall/sail at all, and I doubt its not going to affect the atmosphere much more than a sky scraper, really - cetainly no more than a space elevator.
As for the obvious problem of how to get the diamond, well, its much eassier than to get a billion tonnes of 40,000km carbon nanotubes into orbit. Even the easiest part of that - capturing a carbon rich asteroid, is way beyond us at the moment, and poses an extinction level risk.
I think this thing is really a much more realistic medium-term possibility, and a damn good idea.
There are some variations on the idea though,like this one, that are close to being possible with today's technology, and can even be provisionally costed. Basically the idea is to construct an elevated runway about 100km up, and use mass drivers to hurl stuff into orbit. At that altitude the saving from air resistance is huge and mass drivers become very efficient
At this stage, NASA speanding serious time thinking about space elevators is probably no more useful than daydreaming. Thinking about this kind of thing is probably more productiove though, becuase something might come of it in the medium term, and its almost as efficient as an evelator anyway - with the decided advantage of not being able to collapse and strangle the planet.
(Since I heard about this from a NASA researcher, maybe Im being a little harsh to accuse them of daydreaming)
The actual reseacrh described in the Yahoo article using implanted electrodes seems a bit strange - though the claim to have identified a few individual neurons is interesting.
Most of the other groups are working with stick-on electrodes. At the moment all they can do is move a mosue around a screen and click, but progress seems to be good - Correct recognition is around 70% after 5 one-hour sessions, which sounds impressive to me. The big obstacle to getting this into service for real people with disabilities is that the hardware is currently a bit chunky, especially the EEG machine. But we all know what happens to hardware, very, very quickly.
Oh - and, yes, the guy i talked to says the thing that secretlty drives him is eventually using it to play Quake. (Wonderful thing, altrusim)
Now wouldn't that be cool.(Unfortuantely you have to shave your head, I think!)
I see I have been trolled. God I'm dumb! I think I need an urgent sense of humour transplant.
Um.. you are wrong, so I'll correct you. "Glow in the dark" stuff glows because a chemical reaction is happening, and generating light. This is something completely different. These guys actually brought light to a hault, so that a pulse of light stopped in the crystal
I think the (possible myth?) is that his original description in his story was so good that years later when someone else came to try and patent satellites, they found they couldn't because of the story was such an accurate description that it was considered a sort of "prior art" on par with a scientific paper.I'm not entirely sure to what extent this is really true.
Considering what's happened to the patent office since then, though, I could probably waltz down to the patent office tomorrow, and they'd have no trouble handing me a patent on staellites. Or large orbiting mind control lasers for that matter.
As in the story where everyone depends on calculators, and doing math by hand is revolutionary (sorry if I forgot the name). Its called "The Feeling of Power", I think. It included in several of his collections. He originally wrote it as a joke, but it now has a grain of truth to it.
Just on that last bit - Asimov may have popularized "robot" in its current sense, but he didn't invent the word - he says so himself in a few of his introductions.
Its originally from a Czechslovakian play written around 1900 or so. It means "slave"/"menial worker" in Czech.
Horrah for pointless asides.
I live on the other side of the Atlantic, so I don't hear any of the rhetoric - I just see the decisions this man makes, and from what I can see, he is behaving criminally.
Firstly, the US pays some of the lowest energy prices on the planet. Over here we pay almost three times more for our petrol. Maybe higher prices over there would be a good thing. They might force America to consider how much energy it uses and maybe think about efficiency for a change.
Secondly, you have no energy crisis in any real terms. That thing in California is a problem of administrative incompetence and bad planning, and in no way related to poor energy supplies.
Lastly, the things Bush have proposed are almost unbelievably irresponsible. Even forgetting about CO2 concerns, it is a fact that within the next 30-40 years, oil supply is going to fall behind demand, and gradually dry up altogether. Coal will follow not much later. It is foolish in the extreme to put a large part of investment in new energy infrastructure into fossil fuels - if you do you are going to run hard into a brick wall.
Even forgetting about this - because listening to Bush there is no way he will consider a non-fossil fuel based solution - the fact that he seems opposed to even basic environmental precautions like scrubber systems and good power plant location is incredible. He is such a bought-man that the fact that he seems to retain some respectability and support is hard to understand.
I hope that for the good of the rest of the world - and the US too - that his plans never make it through congress in any recognisable form.
I don't live in the States, so I'm quite curious about this impression that I'm seeing quite strongly on Slashsdot - i.e. that a large proportion of US 'technology enthusaists' really fit the profile of " poor hygiene, little or no conversation skills and attitudes (for instance know-it-all-ism) that are off-putting. That a huge number of them actually are the sterotypical akward social outcasts (during their school yeras anyway) so beloved of Jon Katz.
Is this really a fair representation of the situation in America? Personally, I live in Ireland, and I know a fairly large number of equivalent "geeks" over here - While I'd certainly say that they're a bit "bookish"/slightly introverted, they are almost without exception also well-balanced individuals with other intrests and reasonable social skills, and good experiences of school.
Am I just getting a skewed impression of the US from reading Slashdot/Katz, or is the social situation really very different over there?
This is a great ruling in principal - I think everyone agrees that the basic principal of being free to view or write code, regardless of purpose is a healthy idea - provided you make fair use of that code.
But I think classifying source as "speech" is the wrong way to go about securing that right. Its going to lead to all sorts of redicilious things like source code falling under libel laws,etc.