Trying to make ONE solution fix the problem is completely idiotic.
Energy diversity is where it's at. Each form of power has a different set of NIMBY problems. Different people will have stakes in different forms of power generation, which will distribute the political power of those interests.
We need to have wind, tidal, solar thermal, and next-gen nuclear.
I could see myself controlling my Xbox interface like Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Granted it wouldn't add much to the functionality, but damn if that wouldn't be the coolest gadget ever.
Actually, it would do some things much better than your PC ever could. There's a reason why CRC cards, implemented with dead tree 3x5" cards, is still one of the most effective design tools -- they're great for interacting with other people. Natal opens up the possibility of writing interfaces that are really great for interacting with other people over digital media. The user interface suite we have today -- keyboard, screen, mouse -- is meant to soak up all of your attention! There's a reason why it's called a Workstation! A meeting room and 3x5 cards are great for interacting with other people and exchanging ideas and acting out workflows or APIs. An interface like "Reactable" would be extremely cool for making music. (And that would actually work across high jitter Internet connections!)
Actually, instead of making them mandatory by law, it would be more the "American Way" to make them a part of the normal way of life, much as happened with TV and automobiles. Are we free? Clearly not. Why is HD TV being foisted on us? At least half of us didn't want it. (I no longer get PBS reception. Analog signals degrade gracefully. Also, analog TV audio is a *very* useful low-power and robust information source in post disaster conditions. I know this first hand from hurricane Ike.)
Mecha become reasonable when they can move and maneuver with the same agility as a human being -- think Eva, which can run, dodge and so on with considerable finesse. (Here's waiting for those carbon nanotube aerogel artificial muscles, by the way.) But since we can't even do that for a human-sized exoskeleton, any effort to build a mecha that's not severely dysfunctional is going to be impotent.
The biggest limitation of the Alaskan mecha, is that it has no force-feedback. People who can't feel their own limbs, or the resistance of the ground and objects against them are *incredibly* clumsy. So are robots that try to move with no kinesthetic sense.
Sarcos corporation has developed Haptic Interfaces which give you force-feedback. The military has been working towards humanoid full-body haptic harnesses since the 1970's, actually with really good progress since the 80s.
If you had a full-body haptic harness in the abdomen of a giant mecha, with the pilot secured to the mecha's spine at the small of the back, then you'd have a working giant-human agility mecha. The pilot's own inner ear would work as the balancing mechanism! The parts of the mecha's body would be in the same relative positions as the pilot's, including the head. That, combined with full-body force feedback would be enough. The thing would move slowly like the bosses in "Shadow of the Collossus," but they would move like a human of that size would, because you're just translating a real human's movements and kinesthetic senses to a larger and heavier frame.
Not practical, but it wold be so cool! (And make this Wasilla thing look like a toddler with arms asleep.)
By Sarcos corporation. This one is a bit smaller, and has no grippers yet, but the arms and legs function. IN fact, the arms and legs are *more* agile and human-like than in the Aliens movie!
Balloon tanks are incredibly tough. One engineer with the Atlas program used to invite fellow engineers to try and bust them with a sledgehammer. The hardest sledgehammer blows would just bounce off. Yes, you could puncture one with a pointed maul. But such a tower would consist of many, many such redundant units. You'd need to be hammering for a little while.
How about a Space game with no fixed locations of importance? The only thing important are very large ships. Star systems, planets, moons, and asteroids are just desolate locations where you can get basic resources. (This also makes it easier to procedurally generate universes with *billions* of star systems.)
All of the important things need to be reached by ships with long-range warp capacity. At the beginning, players have ships which can't jump between star systems, and they must attain berths on NPC "motherships" that travel routes between systems. Most of the quests are "events" that happen while ships are "en route." Players who amass enough resources will be able to attain their own motherships and other kinds of long-range warpships.
One advantage of this setup, is that you can make a big part of the game FPS combat aboard ship. Another advantage is that all of the load balancing is inherently dynamic. (Make the "warp fields" of motherships render them invulnerable in-system. They can only be attacked en-route. Simply don't allow more ships into the "warp bubble" than a server can handle.)
There have been unofficial studies done of 100 km tall towers using "aerospace grade" materials. Balloon-tanks of extremely high-pressure gas made out of boron would be amazingly light but have staggering compressive strength. (You'd use lots of small ones to avoid ultra-high pressure in super-long columns.) There have also been studies of towers made form carbon fiber, aluminum, and steel. These have an exponential profile, and a "fractal truss" structure. Though huge, they'd me mostly empty space, to the point that most of the tower would be hard to see from the ground. The tubular beams would have teardrop-shaped fairings to minimize wind loads. The towers as a whole would be staggeringly heavy, but still *theoretically* possible to build, and *theoretically* affordable by superpowers like the United States. Will they ever happen in real life? No way. But engineers and physicists love thinking about this stuff and doing the calcs.
Like all tools, you need to use it for what its calibration is capible [sic] of
You could get quite accurate for big landmarks, which would be useful for navigation in cities like New York, Chicago, and Houston. Implement an app like the camera app with realtime video and add crosshairs. The pointing app would use the camera, GPS, the accelerometers, and the compass. You'd know about where you are, and which direction the camera is pointed. You could then send a *highly* compressed photo to an app at Google, which would calculate the outlines of the big landmarks in the area for the orientation of the iPhone for various positions within the GPS circle of error. The app could then pop up formatted data about the landmark.
You could also use Google Streetview data to recognize when the app is pointing at famous storefronts. Heck, why not just build all of this into the Camera app?
An app with those capabilities would be the envy of Real Estate agents. Heck, they might envy it enough to hate it -- it's just a little *too* easy!
The Original Series (Re:Symptom of the TV-Web)
on
EFF Launches TOS Tracker
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
"TV-Web?" TV was much *better* before the web! Why, in my youth, there was no Internet! We didn't even have computers! We only saw them on Star Trek! The *Original Series*! And you know what? We *liked it*!
(TOS was Usenet shorthand for The Original Series of Star Trek.)
>...It allows individuals to aspire, self-organize, and express their individuality in a helpful way. So in that respect, I agree with the article. I just don't think it's anything new or anything to do with Communism as a system...
So why do we move back to a stupid argument between the absolutes of Capitalism vs Communism when the correct solution is somewhere to be found in the middle?
The key is that the Internet is Infrastructure. The tools we develop on it to organize ourselves are just Infrastructure. Open Source software, OSes and libraries are Infrastructure. It makes sense that individuals will sometimes collaborate in their own self interest to build common infrastructure, because ultimately it results in more benefit to individuals in the form of increased economic activity. If you're going to call the Internet Communist, you might as well also tar roads, bridges, water systems, sewage...
Many think it should all be privatized, but this is a fringe view and the view of the majority is that some infrastructure is best implemented as some kind of collective endeavor, and that this is fine and normal. Communism is just a scare-word to make you think that this is somehow not good and normal.
Deliberately hide the stego resend packets in encrypted Bittorrent traffic. That would make this very hard to detect. Even if the Bittorrent communication was unencrypted, you'd need to figure out which segment of which torrent it's associated with, then calculate the checksum. Since the Bittorrent traffic is encrypted, this makes that much harder. Of course, you could spy on the traffic with your own peer, but the stego could be used to communicate only between known peers, in which case the other peers will never see the stego packets. This would also make traffic analysis much harder.
Members of a ring species can interbreed with their immediate neighbors, but not with distant neighbors halfway around the ring. (So in my diagrom, A can interbreed with B and G, but not C, D, E, or F. Sometimes the ring develops a break, and becomes a line:
A--B--C--D--E--F--G
Then to have a speciation event, all you need is another break in the line:
A--B--C
E--F--G
There are ring species comprised of small creatures who only live in a small range of elevation around the side of a mountain, so their habitat literally looks like a small ring. Two well timed avalanches could be enough.
He's addicted to being a pirate. He's too far gone to be saved...all you can do is sandbag around his computer. But when the replica cannon arrives via UPS, I suggest you leave.
I know a dude who looks like a pirate, talks like a pirate, drinks like a pirate, will pilfer your cool stuff Capt. Jack Sparrow style if you're dumb enough to leave it out and he doesn't know you, has the exact same mentality and personality as Prince Vultan of the Hawkpeople from the old Flash Gordon movie, and owns Multiple Actual Cannon which he likes to set off at the local Renaissance Faire. Oh, and he's married to a hot weird chick who's into chainmail bikinis.
To heck with being a pirate online. I've seen firsthand that you can do a *lot* better than that!
I have a girlfriend, and no, it's not enough to get you out of an MMO addiction. It can be added incentive. Usually, you have to wait until it starts hurting their job and their wallet. If that doesn't do it, good luck!
How about a Next-gen Newton? Target a few niches, where large amounts of user input is not a big factor and use the same strategies as the iPhone to minimize the need to input lots of information. Just make sure the form-factor is very lightweight (A clipboard or a news magazine) and aesthetically pleasing. The form-factor will be key. People should be able to relax when they lounge about in their living rooms with this thing.
Planner
eBook Reader
Mobile Web Browsing
Remote Control (For Media and Home automation)
Email (Reader, primarily)
RSS Feeds
Photo Browser
A lot of this could be done as a Remote Access to their Macintosh computer! This fits in nicely with the "Digital Hub" strategy.
Put in a digital camera, and you can use it to inventory and organize household possessions and also use it as a videophone. Think of it as less an independent computer and more of a new kind of interface for the living room.
The OLPC isolates "3rd party" apps like Firefox in a sandbox. The BIOS OS could virtualize a minimal Windows or Linux OS, modified to do its actual window rendering through a server process in the "User Browser/UI" VM.
The sons Harry Harrison's famous sci-fi super-criminal, the "Stainless Steel Rat," were sent to the harshest military academy in known space, because no other institution would be able to get them to do even a little of their studying. Apparently, the boys did do their studies because the instructors kept recapturing them and chaining them to their desk. As a side effect, they also became expert lockpicks.
I, for one, have no guilt about being alive, and comfortable.
There's nothing in the laws of thermodynamics that says you can't be alive, comfortable, and playing an X-Box 360 *without* releasing fossilized carbon.
The problem with Eve Online, at least it was one a few years back, was that they chose to organize servers by star system. In other words, loads were distributed by named location. (Which was why certain populous systems like Jita often lagged.) Also, this distribution was static and didn't adapt to changing situations. (Like roving fleets of 200 ships.)
Processor load should be distributed by population and user activity. The unit of processing should not be named locations. Aggregations of players should be the basis for the units of processing. With a space game like Eve, this is easy. When people form a fleet or a squadron, the fleet's inertial frame of reference becomes a "locale." (This would be appropriate for a game which actually had Newtonian dynamics, not Eve. Eve could still use it, though.) When two fleets merge, two locales merge. This would be an inherently dynamic load distribution system. The merging operation could be disguised with "warp-in" effects. You could even have a locale moved from server to server, and this could be covered for as a "warp storm" where both sides are effected. (And maybe gangs/fleets are undone and individual ships are all caught in a "warp bubble." That could be cool. It also might encourage some interesting small-group tactics, or units trained to reorganize themselves on the fly.)
Gods, I gotta spell out everything for these Slashdot "geniuses"!
People's daily commute driving would be all-electric, and only long trips would need propane. Once we moved to carbon neutral electric generation, it would be a big win. Propane is also less carbon-emitting per mile. Furthermore, we could produce all of the propane we need domestically. It's not utopia, but still way out ahead of where we are now.
I *thought* you'd get that without my having to spell it out for you. (And you posted that thinking it was *clever*!?)
Slashdot Mirror
Trying to make ONE solution fix the problem is completely idiotic.
Energy diversity is where it's at. Each form of power has a different set of NIMBY problems. Different people will have stakes in different forms of power generation, which will distribute the political power of those interests.
We need to have wind, tidal, solar thermal, and next-gen nuclear.
I could see myself controlling my Xbox interface like Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Granted it wouldn't add much to the functionality, but damn if that wouldn't be the coolest gadget ever.
Actually, it would do some things much better than your PC ever could. There's a reason why CRC cards, implemented with dead tree 3x5" cards, is still one of the most effective design tools -- they're great for interacting with other people. Natal opens up the possibility of writing interfaces that are really great for interacting with other people over digital media. The user interface suite we have today -- keyboard, screen, mouse -- is meant to soak up all of your attention! There's a reason why it's called a Workstation! A meeting room and 3x5 cards are great for interacting with other people and exchanging ideas and acting out workflows or APIs. An interface like "Reactable" would be extremely cool for making music. (And that would actually work across high jitter Internet connections!)
Reactable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEDia3CFdfg
Que the dystopian Sci-Fi short stories!
Actually, instead of making them mandatory by law, it would be more the "American Way" to make them a part of the normal way of life, much as happened with TV and automobiles. Are we free? Clearly not. Why is HD TV being foisted on us? At least half of us didn't want it. (I no longer get PBS reception. Analog signals degrade gracefully. Also, analog TV audio is a *very* useful low-power and robust information source in post disaster conditions. I know this first hand from hurricane Ike.)
Mecha become reasonable when they can move and maneuver with the same agility as a human being -- think Eva, which can run, dodge and so on with considerable finesse. (Here's waiting for those carbon nanotube aerogel artificial muscles, by the way.) But since we can't even do that for a human-sized exoskeleton, any effort to build a mecha that's not severely dysfunctional is going to be impotent.
The biggest limitation of the Alaskan mecha, is that it has no force-feedback. People who can't feel their own limbs, or the resistance of the ground and objects against them are *incredibly* clumsy. So are robots that try to move with no kinesthetic sense.
Sarcos corporation has developed Haptic Interfaces which give you force-feedback. The military has been working towards humanoid full-body haptic harnesses since the 1970's, actually with really good progress since the 80s.
Look at the example videos on this page: http://www.sarcos.com/teleop_videos.html
I like the "Large Dextrous Arm" which is shown holding a freaking anvil like a beer mug.
There's also Sarcos corporation's "Loader-Lifter" which incorporates those haptic technologies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhj3Z9o6t0g
If you had a full-body haptic harness in the abdomen of a giant mecha, with the pilot secured to the mecha's spine at the small of the back, then you'd have a working giant-human agility mecha. The pilot's own inner ear would work as the balancing mechanism! The parts of the mecha's body would be in the same relative positions as the pilot's, including the head. That, combined with full-body force feedback would be enough. The thing would move slowly like the bosses in "Shadow of the Collossus," but they would move like a human of that size would, because you're just translating a real human's movements and kinesthetic senses to a larger and heavier frame.
Not practical, but it wold be so cool! (And make this Wasilla thing look like a toddler with arms asleep.)
By Sarcos corporation. This one is a bit smaller, and has no grippers yet, but the arms and legs function. IN fact, the arms and legs are *more* agile and human-like than in the Aliens movie!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhj3Z9o6t0g
Balloon tanks are incredibly tough. One engineer with the Atlas program used to invite fellow engineers to try and bust them with a sledgehammer. The hardest sledgehammer blows would just bounce off. Yes, you could puncture one with a pointed maul. But such a tower would consist of many, many such redundant units. You'd need to be hammering for a little while.
How about a Space game with no fixed locations of importance? The only thing important are very large ships. Star systems, planets, moons, and asteroids are just desolate locations where you can get basic resources. (This also makes it easier to procedurally generate universes with *billions* of star systems.)
All of the important things need to be reached by ships with long-range warp capacity. At the beginning, players have ships which can't jump between star systems, and they must attain berths on NPC "motherships" that travel routes between systems. Most of the quests are "events" that happen while ships are "en route." Players who amass enough resources will be able to attain their own motherships and other kinds of long-range warpships.
One advantage of this setup, is that you can make a big part of the game FPS combat aboard ship. Another advantage is that all of the load balancing is inherently dynamic. (Make the "warp fields" of motherships render them invulnerable in-system. They can only be attacked en-route. Simply don't allow more ships into the "warp bubble" than a server can handle.)
There have been unofficial studies done of 100 km tall towers using "aerospace grade" materials. Balloon-tanks of extremely high-pressure gas made out of boron would be amazingly light but have staggering compressive strength. (You'd use lots of small ones to avoid ultra-high pressure in super-long columns.) There have also been studies of towers made form carbon fiber, aluminum, and steel. These have an exponential profile, and a "fractal truss" structure. Though huge, they'd me mostly empty space, to the point that most of the tower would be hard to see from the ground. The tubular beams would have teardrop-shaped fairings to minimize wind loads. The towers as a whole would be staggeringly heavy, but still *theoretically* possible to build, and *theoretically* affordable by superpowers like the United States. Will they ever happen in real life? No way. But engineers and physicists love thinking about this stuff and doing the calcs.
Like all tools, you need to use it for what its calibration is capible [sic] of
You could get quite accurate for big landmarks, which would be useful for navigation in cities like New York, Chicago, and Houston. Implement an app like the camera app with realtime video and add crosshairs. The pointing app would use the camera, GPS, the accelerometers, and the compass. You'd know about where you are, and which direction the camera is pointed. You could then send a *highly* compressed photo to an app at Google, which would calculate the outlines of the big landmarks in the area for the orientation of the iPhone for various positions within the GPS circle of error. The app could then pop up formatted data about the landmark.
You could also use Google Streetview data to recognize when the app is pointing at famous storefronts. Heck, why not just build all of this into the Camera app?
An app with those capabilities would be the envy of Real Estate agents. Heck, they might envy it enough to hate it -- it's just a little *too* easy!
"TV-Web?" TV was much *better* before the web! Why, in my youth, there was no Internet! We didn't even have computers! We only saw them on Star Trek! The *Original Series*! And you know what? We *liked it*!
(TOS was Usenet shorthand for The Original Series of Star Trek.)
> ...It allows individuals to aspire, self-organize, and express their individuality in a helpful way. So in that respect, I agree with the article. I just don't think it's anything new or anything to do with Communism as a system...
So why do we move back to a stupid argument between the absolutes of Capitalism vs Communism when the correct solution is somewhere to be found in the middle?
The key is that the Internet is Infrastructure. The tools we develop on it to organize ourselves are just Infrastructure. Open Source software, OSes and libraries are Infrastructure. It makes sense that individuals will sometimes collaborate in their own self interest to build common infrastructure, because ultimately it results in more benefit to individuals in the form of increased economic activity. If you're going to call the Internet Communist, you might as well also tar roads, bridges, water systems, sewage...
Many think it should all be privatized, but this is a fringe view and the view of the majority is that some infrastructure is best implemented as some kind of collective endeavor, and that this is fine and normal. Communism is just a scare-word to make you think that this is somehow not good and normal.
Deliberately hide the stego resend packets in encrypted Bittorrent traffic. That would make this very hard to detect. Even if the Bittorrent communication was unencrypted, you'd need to figure out which segment of which torrent it's associated with, then calculate the checksum. Since the Bittorrent traffic is encrypted, this makes that much harder. Of course, you could spy on the traffic with your own peer, but the stego could be used to communicate only between known peers, in which case the other peers will never see the stego packets. This would also make traffic analysis much harder.
When we observe Ring Species we are clearly catching mother nature red-handed in the act of speciation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
These things are freaky:
A--B--C--D--E--F--G--A
Members of a ring species can interbreed with their immediate neighbors, but not with distant neighbors halfway around the ring. (So in my diagrom, A can interbreed with B and G, but not C, D, E, or F. Sometimes the ring develops a break, and becomes a line:
A--B--C--D--E--F--G
Then to have a speciation event, all you need is another break in the line:
A--B--C
E--F--G
There are ring species comprised of small creatures who only live in a small range of elevation around the side of a mountain, so their habitat literally looks like a small ring. Two well timed avalanches could be enough.
He's addicted to being a pirate. He's too far gone to be saved...all you can do is sandbag around his computer. But when the replica cannon arrives via UPS, I suggest you leave.
I know a dude who looks like a pirate, talks like a pirate, drinks like a pirate, will pilfer your cool stuff Capt. Jack Sparrow style if you're dumb enough to leave it out and he doesn't know you, has the exact same mentality and personality as Prince Vultan of the Hawkpeople from the old Flash Gordon movie, and owns Multiple Actual Cannon which he likes to set off at the local Renaissance Faire. Oh, and he's married to a hot weird chick who's into chainmail bikinis.
To heck with being a pirate online. I've seen firsthand that you can do a *lot* better than that!
I have a girlfriend, and no, it's not enough to get you out of an MMO addiction. It can be added incentive. Usually, you have to wait until it starts hurting their job and their wallet. If that doesn't do it, good luck!
Who needs an Adult version? After all, college students loved the Teletubbies. Any excuse for intoxication.
How about a Next-gen Newton? Target a few niches, where large amounts of user input is not a big factor and use the same strategies as the iPhone to minimize the need to input lots of information. Just make sure the form-factor is very lightweight (A clipboard or a news magazine) and aesthetically pleasing. The form-factor will be key. People should be able to relax when they lounge about in their living rooms with this thing.
A lot of this could be done as a Remote Access to their Macintosh computer! This fits in nicely with the "Digital Hub" strategy.
Put in a digital camera, and you can use it to inventory and organize household possessions and also use it as a videophone. Think of it as less an independent computer and more of a new kind of interface for the living room.
The OLPC isolates "3rd party" apps like Firefox in a sandbox. The BIOS OS could virtualize a minimal Windows or Linux OS, modified to do its actual window rendering through a server process in the "User Browser/UI" VM.
The sons Harry Harrison's famous sci-fi super-criminal, the "Stainless Steel Rat," were sent to the harshest military academy in known space, because no other institution would be able to get them to do even a little of their studying. Apparently, the boys did do their studies because the instructors kept recapturing them and chaining them to their desk. As a side effect, they also became expert lockpicks.
http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Stainless-Steel-Harry-Harrison/dp/0441004229/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242671490&sr=8-1
I, for one, have no guilt about being alive, and comfortable.
There's nothing in the laws of thermodynamics that says you can't be alive, comfortable, and playing an X-Box 360 *without* releasing fossilized carbon.
In other words, now we don't know what might happen and we're *still* mucking with our climate.
Someone needs to pull a John Stewart/Jim Cramer on Gartner. These guys spread so much BS, yet continue to be considered an authority.
The problem with Eve Online, at least it was one a few years back, was that they chose to organize servers by star system. In other words, loads were distributed by named location. (Which was why certain populous systems like Jita often lagged.) Also, this distribution was static and didn't adapt to changing situations. (Like roving fleets of 200 ships.)
Processor load should be distributed by population and user activity. The unit of processing should not be named locations. Aggregations of players should be the basis for the units of processing. With a space game like Eve, this is easy. When people form a fleet or a squadron, the fleet's inertial frame of reference becomes a "locale." (This would be appropriate for a game which actually had Newtonian dynamics, not Eve. Eve could still use it, though.) When two fleets merge, two locales merge. This would be an inherently dynamic load distribution system. The merging operation could be disguised with "warp-in" effects. You could even have a locale moved from server to server, and this could be covered for as a "warp storm" where both sides are effected. (And maybe gangs/fleets are undone and individual ships are all caught in a "warp bubble." That could be cool. It also might encourage some interesting small-group tactics, or units trained to reorganize themselves on the fly.)
Gods, I gotta spell out everything for these Slashdot "geniuses"!
People's daily commute driving would be all-electric, and only long trips would need propane. Once we moved to carbon neutral electric generation, it would be a big win. Propane is also less carbon-emitting per mile. Furthermore, we could produce all of the propane we need domestically. It's not utopia, but still way out ahead of where we are now.
I *thought* you'd get that without my having to spell it out for you. (And you posted that thinking it was *clever*!?)
If all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. Maybe Dean's been patenting too much stuff and needs a breather?