Of the 153,183 projects on Sourceforge as of this writing, 40,823 (26.6%) are "beta", 34,131 (22.3%) are "production", and 2,936 (1.9%) are "mature".
Forgive me for not walking through the rest, but games aren't *that* far away from the average; other ways of slicing the data set would show above-average completion.
My point is that in your phrase:
EVERYBODY can have a good game idea, but it takes some hard effort to actually implement it, and it takes really hard nuts to finish it.
People have pointed out the size differential, and that's part of it, but not the whole story. The real reason is... for all we bitch and moan, the service is good enough.
People like to bitch and moan. But for as much as they bitch and moan about dropped calls, just try raising their cell phone prices to pay for more towers in places where they go perhaps 1% of the time. Watch them skip over the bitching and moaning and go straight to "switching or dropping their service".
Certainly we could afford near-total coverage of the country. Therefore, obviously we have decided via the market that it's not worth it.
There's no empirical standard by which you can judge this "wrong". It's just an economic choice.
What really drives this choice isn't just the size disparity directly, it's the sheer quantity of towers that you'd have to put up that would cover only 1-20 customers. Why shoud we put those towers up if they aren't going to be profitable? So we can win a pissing match?
(I can almost smell the replies complaining about how the market has made a sub-optimal choice. Well, I don't think regulation is stopping people from putting up tower enough (a little regulation just raisese the prices a bit, it doesn't prevent things from happening), and, well, the "I'm smarter than the market" fallacy certain has a long, pedigreed history.... but it's not usually a good bet in this sort of situtation. I'll bet on the market having something pretty close to the optimum here over the handwaving arguments of a Slashdot poster.)
You sort of prove my point; your intuition has led you to make more fallacious conclusions.
Modes don't mean that you're resonating a part of the object; in order to resonate you still need to get the impulse all the way from one end of the elevator to the other. You can't just excite the 6,000,000th harmonic near the ground and get resonant behaviour; it would still have to make it all the way to the end and come back in order to resonate. The station at geosync still has plenty of time to see potentially resonant vibrations and damp them with conventional thrust before they are a problem. Your intuition misleads you because even our largest structures here on Earth transmit vibration from one end to the other in mere seconds, so building up modes is possible. The Space elevator doesn't work that way.
A plane crashing into the space elevator would most likely destroy the plane and leave the space elevator unscathed. Maybe if you hit it with an engine that might not be the case. Maybe. Remember, planes are as flimsy as they can possibly be without falling apart in the air, and the space elevator is the strongest material known to man, concentrated into a very small volume.
So what happens when the fiber is severed in low earth orbit?
Don't just ask; compute the odds of the space elevator actually hitting a satellite in orbit if severed, and even if left completely uncontrolled by humans afterwords. Your intution has mislead you about the size of even what we call "Low Earth Orbit". You obviously won't believe me if I just tell you, so you work the math. Compute the volume of space that constutions low earth orbit. Compute the ratio of the volumes swept out by the space elevator in a day, and a normal-sized satellite in a day. Ponder the odds of one hitting the other in any time period before the sun expands and consumes the Earth, especially given that we can move satellites around enough to miss the elevator if we want.
(I actually have already done this math in a previous post about the Space Elevator concept on Slashdot, so I've done my bit to convince myself.)
No matter how thin the strand, eventually their paths will cross.
Yeah? Why don't you do some math? And remember the Space Elevator itself can be actively moved.
You don't understand the size of the volume of orbital space vs. the orbital volume 'consumed' by sattelites, because your intuition isn't set up to handle volumes of that size. You don't understand the physics of airplanes crashing into things, because you brain is used to the small, relatively hard objects of everyday life. (A plane is much closer in behavior to tin foil than a rock. For a more real-world example of this, consult the recent Mythbusters episode where they chop up a plane's fuselage with another plane's propellor. Now imagine the propeller is made of diamond and impacting the plane at 300mph. What you get is two halves of a plane and one intact diamond.)
I'm still not certain that you understand the physics of a severed space elevator; given the rest of the message I doubt it.
And worst of all, your intuition mislead you enough for you to post a snotty message "correcting" somebody else, insisting that your ignorance is knowledge.
This is why I say you can't trust your intuition in this domain. It's more than just "not right", it's actively wrong.
The space elevator falls into the "Really Big" category of things, and using your traditional, every-day intuition about how things behave is actively unhelpful.
We are talking a device ~60,000 miles long, feet wide, and paper-thin. So...
I am thinking of storm type winds blowing it off balance
The atmosphere extends up a few tens of miles at most. The Space Elevator is 60,000 miles long.
making it resonate
Compute the resonance frequency of a device 60,000 miles long.
Even to the extent it's a problem, it's not like it's hard to react to; you've got all day.
the danger to aeroplanes,
What danger to airplanes? Are you envisioning something that's going to randomly and rapidly maraud across the surface of the Earth or something?
It's way, way, way easier to dodge a stationary space elevator than all the other constantly moving planes in the sky.
the disastrous consequences of breakage
You're just assuming. Somebody beat me to pointing out this is false, but I want to point out you're assuming based on your everyday experience. It works poorly in this domain.
For instance, what you probably think happens if there is a cut near the ground is the exact opposite of what happens, because your intuition is not set up for these kinds of problems.
You need to turn to the math on this. Other people have worked out the issues. Most of what you consider the "real problems" aren't, and I don't mean that as a comment on your particular post, I mean it in general. Other things that you might never think about are, such as the concern raised in TFA, which I think are valid but aren't necessarily stoppers, and the ever-present question of whether we'll ever be able to turn out 60,000 miles of cable of any kind.
Your intuition is worthless. Nothing personal; mine is too. Having studied the topics involved I can say I understand some of this stuff intellectually, but I can't say I understand it in my gut. But I do know not to trust my gut in this domain.
(For what it's worth, similar concerns apply w.r.t. nanotechnology. Your intuition about how things work does not do very well at that scale. Our brains function at the in-between scale we all live and work in, and does not do well outside of that domain.)
(60,000 mile note: I'm assuming the elevator design that extends in both directions from geosync, as I like the "throwing" ability it exhibits over the counter-weight-just-outside-of-geosync model. Other distances are possible but don't fundamentally change the results.)
Please hold your partisanship for a few paragraphs; thank you.
A conservative national talk show host has a prescription drug problem. He is instant national news for weeks. The story re-appears for a day or two every time there is a blip in the various legal cases. It's held up of proof of all sorts of things. The evidence is that there was a problem, but that the story was taken past what the actual evidence supports. (Resolution; it's somewhat ambiguous and can be read either way, but my point is simply that that is the case, that it wasn't such a slam dunk that the prosecution nailed him to the wall, despite fairly clearly wanting to.)
A liberal Senator has a prescription drug problem, and gets into an auto accident. The story in mentioned on the day it happened, and pretty much disappears after that.
Now, ignoring partisanship for a bit longer: Which of these is actually more important? A talk show host illegally using drugs, or a United States Senator, whose concentrated power is basically exceeded only by a Supreme Court Justice and the President? If you can possibly answer "talk show host", you're probably pretty ideologically blinkered.
This is what produces accusations of bias in the press. Bad story about a conservative talk show host? zOMG, zerg rush! Same bad story about a liberal Senator? Oh, ho hum, look at the cute Kennedy.
And my personal complaint lies more along the Senator/Talk-show-host axis than the conservative/liberal axis. I really wish our media in general would divert just a small fraction of their ire at our President, who merely constitutes one branch of our government, and spend a bit more time examining our Congressman, because the spending is outrageous, and the corruption is fully bipartisan and everybody who isn't trying to score empty rhetorical points against some side or other can agree that nobody in Congress should be corrupt.
(Especially with Congress' current approval ratings you'd think the media would be smelling blood and investigating Congress every which way. But it really doesn't seem to be happening much...)
Adding to your confusion, "HAND" is an ancient Usenet acronym for "Have A Nice Day!", which usually shows up in the full acronym phrase "YHBT. YHL. HAND!", which is of course "You Have Been Trolled. You Have Lost. Have A Nice Day!"
"hand!" really looks like someone just lowercased the acronym.
Actually, progress does increase with economic resources thrown at it. It's a derivative of Moore's law.
I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your brochure.
Please explain more fully how you get "progress increases with economic resources thrown at it" from "the complexity of integrated circuits, with respect to minimum component cost, doubles every 24 months".
Perhaps you didn't mean "derivative", but there's no way to make sense of that statement that I can see.
You are especially being disingenuous by using Moore's law as your implied cost/benefit curve, as nothing other than electronic circuits has experienced an exponential curve for so many decades. You have to consider the cost/benefits when doling out money. Fusion is on anything but an exponential curve; in fact it's damn near on a constant curve, making almost zero progress over time, as evidenced by how it's been "40-50 years in the future" for 40-50 years now.
A weakened version of your claim, that all else being equal more dollars will progress more than less dollars, is trivially true but useless, because that progress could very well be very minimal even for a gigantic investment, and perhaps ironically given your argument, fusion is almost certainly the canonical example of that case.
Human beings control the mating stock.... You can't do that with bacteria.... You might still need a yearly cleaning.
I don't think you're getting it; a "yearly cleaning" (the way you mean it) is "controlling the mating stock". There's no significant, practical difference between bacteria and cows at the abstraction level I'm speaking at.
What stops cows from mutating into something less optimal for humans?
When (not if) it happens, we kill the results and don't let them breed.
Why do you think it'll be any different with the bacteria? It's not as if all the bacteria in the world will be in one tank in one gigantic, completely inseperable pile.
I consider this one of the more insightful quotes from any bit of literature, ever. You can learn a lot from considering what should have happened if X is true and comparing it to reality to determine if perhaps X is not true.
People more usually ask whether X is a plausible explanation, but that false-positives too often to be a useful standard. With a bit of work and perhaps a dollop of self-deception, anything can be a plausible explanation for anything else.
This principle is an excellent tool for finding misdirections of all kinds; with it you can find much that is hidden in plain sight.
And we all want one for $100, and we'd all gladly pay up to $400 for one.... MIT is showing us the market, and they're refusing to compete!
I really don't understand this. "We don't want to sell 'first-worlders' these laptops for $100." I sort of understand, if they're taking a loss. But why not sell them for $249*, and advertise that all profits go to subsidize further development and deployment of these laptops in their intended role?
The other reason to do it this way is that you really ought to get these laptops in the hands of "first world" open source developers and users, so they can start working on making these things even more useful. Since you really can't target just "open source developers", you need to let them out to everyone. (Besides, open source communities are generally robust in proportion to the number of people in them, because developers are attracted to larger population communities for a lot of reasons. You can't just magically create a developer-only community of any size.) Hopefully someday the intended users will be able to help, but that will take a while because first they've got to work their way up to "computer literacy" before they're going to be developing.
(*: If $249 would not itself be a profitable price point, then the $100 laptop project has failed in the $100 goal. A $1000 laptop is $100 with a $900 loss/subsidy, but who cares?)
PHP is great for its templating features, the ability to separate content from design, and its speed of development.
Um, sorry, could you show me which language more tightly couples content and design?
Binding content and design is what those web template languages do. It's why they're better than traditional CGI scripts for quick projects and crash and burn for large projects, unless you add something to manage the separation. That some people have managed to assemble frameworks that do sort of separate content and design as things you can add-on, is more a tribute to the frameworks and the framework designers than PHP; the design of PHP really fights that sort of thing, since it "wants" to re-parse everything involved with the page on every load. (I am aware they have since "fixed" that problem; my point is that they had to fix it, not that it was unfixable. With other structures the problem doesn't arise.)
(I'm sort of OK using such languages, but only when you can have backend code that isn't written in the template language. I use Perl and Apache::ASP, where the web app is backed by Perl modules that do all the heavy lifting and can actually be used outside of the webserver, too. The ASP/PHP-like code just does final formatting and display. The "design" is in the Perl modules and the "display" is in the ASP/PHP-like code.)
The term "addiction" is usually considered perjorative, and is not used for necessities of life such as food, water, oxygen, and the temperature range our biology expects.
Some careful consideration will reveal that all four of those things are in fact just expressions of energy patterns in mass. One of them happens to be completely taken care of by the biosphere, but that makes it no less true.
Further thought points out that, in the immortal words of CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system." (The quote may be oddly sourced but it's still very true.)
"Oil addiction" is probably not the best way of thinking about it, but has some truth. "Energy addiction" is a complete pointless way of thinking about our energy needs. The "solution" to energy addiction is death. You're much better off thinking in terms of balancing our supply and demand, growing the true supply while shrinking the demand.
The universe is awash in energy, still flush in its youth.
Given that my hand held calculator is more powerfull than the 2 room large ENIAC of yesteryear I would not be surprised if in the future fusion reactors could be minituarized to fit in cars.
Bad analogy. Nothing has had the improvement curve computing has had. Because of fusion's requirement for mind-bogglingly high temperatures and pressures to work, you're just not going to be able to shrink it very much. (Nanotech might help in building the reactors by providing advanced materials, but there are some things you simply need mass for.)
Unless we discover a cold fusion process that produces usable energy, this isn't going to change. I'm not prepared to say that's impossible, but we're currently short of prospects on that. (But with some room left for discovery; after all there are some cold fusion processes, they just don't come anywhere near break even.)
You didn't raise any particularly interesting ones!
That's my point.
Why should I "address" your uninteresting issues? Your personal lack of faith in engineering is your problem. I just didn't think it should go unchallenged.
Just take a look at Windows for an example of what happens when you try to incrementally evolve something like this: 6 years with basically no innovation because updating anything is so slow and difficult.
With respect, you've mistaken "incremental" for "maintaining backwards compatibility at all costs". They're not the same at all, and I'd never suggest trying to maintain any sort of backwards compatibility in this context.
Your post makes complete sense if you make that substitution.
I routinely make incremental changes to my software that aren't backwards compatible. Often (and increasingly) my unit tests tell me what things I may have forgotten about that use it. I just finished one just before checking Slashdot for a break. In fact, more often than not I don't keep backwards compatibility; I've really been trending towards the thought lately that it's a trap, not a good idea, looking great in the short term and completely killing you in the long term.
A better comparision is IBM. Used to be completely dominant, looked to be crashing for a while, eventually came back as a company than only be described as wise, something very unusual for a company, and experienced great success once again as a player in a larger industry, instead of depending on domination.
Or at least in the case of Nintendo, potentially wise; we'll have to see how this turns out. But if it turns out well, I'd say it's an appropriate word.
Batteries have always been nasty, from the very first lead-acid batteries on to today.
Lithium-ion batteries, for instance, have the habit of exploding when charged. It took a lot of engineering and electronics wrapped around the charging of lithium-ion batteries to make them safe for consumer use.
But when's the last time you heard about a lithium-ion battery exploding on someone? I haven't heard about it in a while. And it's been even longer since I've heard about it when it wasn't the person's fault.
There are "questions to be answered", sure, but you sort of act like this is news. I could equally write a "questions to be answered" post about automobiles, starting with the impossibility of storing gasoline correctly. There are people who can answer those questions called "engineers", and while I wouldn't jump on the first iteration of the technology, the battery field has a pretty good track record overall. If it comes out for consumer use, it'll almost certainly be very safe after six months on the market.
Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter -we- are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself. - Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye"
Complete list of quotes here, although for full effect you really need to hear some of them. The voice acting on Alpha Centauri is among the best ever done for video games. Especially the Ascent to Transcendance sequence, though I find I prefer the second-to-last project to the last one.
I'd post these, but every time I do my bandwidth gets shot all to hell.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Of the 153,183 projects on Sourceforge as of this writing, 40,823 (26.6%) are "beta", 34,131 (22.3%) are "production", and 2,936 (1.9%) are "mature".
Forgive me for not walking through the rest, but games aren't *that* far away from the average; other ways of slicing the data set would show above-average completion.
My point is that in your phrase:
EVERYBODY can have a good game idea, but it takes some hard effort to actually implement it, and it takes really hard nuts to finish it.
the word "game" is extraneous.
People have pointed out the size differential, and that's part of it, but not the whole story. The real reason is... for all we bitch and moan, the service is good enough.
People like to bitch and moan. But for as much as they bitch and moan about dropped calls, just try raising their cell phone prices to pay for more towers in places where they go perhaps 1% of the time. Watch them skip over the bitching and moaning and go straight to "switching or dropping their service".
Certainly we could afford near-total coverage of the country. Therefore, obviously we have decided via the market that it's not worth it.
There's no empirical standard by which you can judge this "wrong". It's just an economic choice.
What really drives this choice isn't just the size disparity directly, it's the sheer quantity of towers that you'd have to put up that would cover only 1-20 customers. Why shoud we put those towers up if they aren't going to be profitable? So we can win a pissing match?
(I can almost smell the replies complaining about how the market has made a sub-optimal choice. Well, I don't think regulation is stopping people from putting up tower enough (a little regulation just raisese the prices a bit, it doesn't prevent things from happening), and, well, the "I'm smarter than the market" fallacy certain has a long, pedigreed history.... but it's not usually a good bet in this sort of situtation. I'll bet on the market having something pretty close to the optimum here over the handwaving arguments of a Slashdot poster.)
You haven't disproved his point. "Turning a blind eye to" something and "decrying" it are orthogonal.
Words aren't actions.
You sort of prove my point; your intuition has led you to make more fallacious conclusions.
Modes don't mean that you're resonating a part of the object; in order to resonate you still need to get the impulse all the way from one end of the elevator to the other. You can't just excite the 6,000,000th harmonic near the ground and get resonant behaviour; it would still have to make it all the way to the end and come back in order to resonate. The station at geosync still has plenty of time to see potentially resonant vibrations and damp them with conventional thrust before they are a problem. Your intuition misleads you because even our largest structures here on Earth transmit vibration from one end to the other in mere seconds, so building up modes is possible. The Space elevator doesn't work that way.
A plane crashing into the space elevator would most likely destroy the plane and leave the space elevator unscathed. Maybe if you hit it with an engine that might not be the case. Maybe. Remember, planes are as flimsy as they can possibly be without falling apart in the air, and the space elevator is the strongest material known to man, concentrated into a very small volume.
So what happens when the fiber is severed in low earth orbit?
Don't just ask; compute the odds of the space elevator actually hitting a satellite in orbit if severed, and even if left completely uncontrolled by humans afterwords. Your intution has mislead you about the size of even what we call "Low Earth Orbit". You obviously won't believe me if I just tell you, so you work the math. Compute the volume of space that constutions low earth orbit. Compute the ratio of the volumes swept out by the space elevator in a day, and a normal-sized satellite in a day. Ponder the odds of one hitting the other in any time period before the sun expands and consumes the Earth, especially given that we can move satellites around enough to miss the elevator if we want.
(I actually have already done this math in a previous post about the Space Elevator concept on Slashdot, so I've done my bit to convince myself.)
No matter how thin the strand, eventually their paths will cross.
Yeah? Why don't you do some math? And remember the Space Elevator itself can be actively moved.
You don't understand the size of the volume of orbital space vs. the orbital volume 'consumed' by sattelites, because your intuition isn't set up to handle volumes of that size. You don't understand the physics of airplanes crashing into things, because you brain is used to the small, relatively hard objects of everyday life. (A plane is much closer in behavior to tin foil than a rock. For a more real-world example of this, consult the recent Mythbusters episode where they chop up a plane's fuselage with another plane's propellor. Now imagine the propeller is made of diamond and impacting the plane at 300mph. What you get is two halves of a plane and one intact diamond.)
I'm still not certain that you understand the physics of a severed space elevator; given the rest of the message I doubt it.
And worst of all, your intuition mislead you enough for you to post a snotty message "correcting" somebody else, insisting that your ignorance is knowledge.
This is why I say you can't trust your intuition in this domain. It's more than just "not right", it's actively wrong.
The space elevator falls into the "Really Big" category of things, and using your traditional, every-day intuition about how things behave is actively unhelpful.
We are talking a device ~60,000 miles long, feet wide, and paper-thin. So...
I am thinking of storm type winds blowing it off balance
The atmosphere extends up a few tens of miles at most. The Space Elevator is 60,000 miles long.
making it resonate
Compute the resonance frequency of a device 60,000 miles long.
Even to the extent it's a problem, it's not like it's hard to react to; you've got all day.
the danger to aeroplanes,
What danger to airplanes? Are you envisioning something that's going to randomly and rapidly maraud across the surface of the Earth or something?
It's way, way, way easier to dodge a stationary space elevator than all the other constantly moving planes in the sky.
the disastrous consequences of breakage
You're just assuming. Somebody beat me to pointing out this is false, but I want to point out you're assuming based on your everyday experience. It works poorly in this domain.
For instance, what you probably think happens if there is a cut near the ground is the exact opposite of what happens, because your intuition is not set up for these kinds of problems.
You need to turn to the math on this. Other people have worked out the issues. Most of what you consider the "real problems" aren't, and I don't mean that as a comment on your particular post, I mean it in general. Other things that you might never think about are, such as the concern raised in TFA, which I think are valid but aren't necessarily stoppers, and the ever-present question of whether we'll ever be able to turn out 60,000 miles of cable of any kind.
Your intuition is worthless. Nothing personal; mine is too. Having studied the topics involved I can say I understand some of this stuff intellectually, but I can't say I understand it in my gut. But I do know not to trust my gut in this domain.
(For what it's worth, similar concerns apply w.r.t. nanotechnology. Your intuition about how things work does not do very well at that scale. Our brains function at the in-between scale we all live and work in, and does not do well outside of that domain.)
(60,000 mile note: I'm assuming the elevator design that extends in both directions from geosync, as I like the "throwing" ability it exhibits over the counter-weight-just-outside-of-geosync model. Other distances are possible but don't fundamentally change the results.)
So the difference lies in the accusation and not the truth?
Kinda strengthens my biased-press point; clearly, the press prefers to toss semi-substantiated accusations more in one direction than another.
Please hold your partisanship for a few paragraphs; thank you.
A conservative national talk show host has a prescription drug problem. He is instant national news for weeks. The story re-appears for a day or two every time there is a blip in the various legal cases. It's held up of proof of all sorts of things. The evidence is that there was a problem, but that the story was taken past what the actual evidence supports. (Resolution; it's somewhat ambiguous and can be read either way, but my point is simply that that is the case, that it wasn't such a slam dunk that the prosecution nailed him to the wall, despite fairly clearly wanting to.)
A liberal Senator has a prescription drug problem, and gets into an auto accident. The story in mentioned on the day it happened, and pretty much disappears after that.
Now, ignoring partisanship for a bit longer: Which of these is actually more important? A talk show host illegally using drugs, or a United States Senator, whose concentrated power is basically exceeded only by a Supreme Court Justice and the President? If you can possibly answer "talk show host", you're probably pretty ideologically blinkered.
This is what produces accusations of bias in the press. Bad story about a conservative talk show host? zOMG, zerg rush! Same bad story about a liberal Senator? Oh, ho hum, look at the cute Kennedy.
And my personal complaint lies more along the Senator/Talk-show-host axis than the conservative/liberal axis. I really wish our media in general would divert just a small fraction of their ire at our President, who merely constitutes one branch of our government, and spend a bit more time examining our Congressman, because the spending is outrageous, and the corruption is fully bipartisan and everybody who isn't trying to score empty rhetorical points against some side or other can agree that nobody in Congress should be corrupt.
(Especially with Congress' current approval ratings you'd think the media would be smelling blood and investigating Congress every which way. But it really doesn't seem to be happening much...)
Adding to your confusion, "HAND" is an ancient Usenet acronym for "Have A Nice Day!", which usually shows up in the full acronym phrase "YHBT. YHL. HAND!", which is of course "You Have Been Trolled. You Have Lost. Have A Nice Day!"
"hand!" really looks like someone just lowercased the acronym.
Actually, progress does increase with economic resources thrown at it. It's a derivative of Moore's law.
I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your brochure.
Please explain more fully how you get "progress increases with economic resources thrown at it" from "the complexity of integrated circuits, with respect to minimum component cost, doubles every 24 months".
Perhaps you didn't mean "derivative", but there's no way to make sense of that statement that I can see.
You are especially being disingenuous by using Moore's law as your implied cost/benefit curve, as nothing other than electronic circuits has experienced an exponential curve for so many decades. You have to consider the cost/benefits when doling out money. Fusion is on anything but an exponential curve; in fact it's damn near on a constant curve, making almost zero progress over time, as evidenced by how it's been "40-50 years in the future" for 40-50 years now.
A weakened version of your claim, that all else being equal more dollars will progress more than less dollars, is trivially true but useless, because that progress could very well be very minimal even for a gigantic investment, and perhaps ironically given your argument, fusion is almost certainly the canonical example of that case.
Human beings control the mating stock.... You can't do that with bacteria.... You might still need a yearly cleaning.
I don't think you're getting it; a "yearly cleaning" (the way you mean it) is "controlling the mating stock". There's no significant, practical difference between bacteria and cows at the abstraction level I'm speaking at.
What stops cows from mutating into something less optimal for humans?
When (not if) it happens, we kill the results and don't let them breed.
Why do you think it'll be any different with the bacteria? It's not as if all the bacteria in the world will be in one tank in one gigantic, completely inseperable pile.
Touche. I should have made that connection.
Your Blogger profile says you're in engineering. Have you considered a career in journalism?
Yup, that's it.
I consider this one of the more insightful quotes from any bit of literature, ever. You can learn a lot from considering what should have happened if X is true and comparing it to reality to determine if perhaps X is not true.
People more usually ask whether X is a plausible explanation, but that false-positives too often to be a useful standard. With a bit of work and perhaps a dollop of self-deception, anything can be a plausible explanation for anything else.
This principle is an excellent tool for finding misdirections of all kinds; with it you can find much that is hidden in plain sight.
And we all want one for $100, and we'd all gladly pay up to $400 for one.... MIT is showing us the market, and they're refusing to compete!
I really don't understand this. "We don't want to sell 'first-worlders' these laptops for $100." I sort of understand, if they're taking a loss. But why not sell them for $249*, and advertise that all profits go to subsidize further development and deployment of these laptops in their intended role?
The other reason to do it this way is that you really ought to get these laptops in the hands of "first world" open source developers and users, so they can start working on making these things even more useful. Since you really can't target just "open source developers", you need to let them out to everyone. (Besides, open source communities are generally robust in proportion to the number of people in them, because developers are attracted to larger population communities for a lot of reasons. You can't just magically create a developer-only community of any size.) Hopefully someday the intended users will be able to help, but that will take a while because first they've got to work their way up to "computer literacy" before they're going to be developing.
(*: If $249 would not itself be a profitable price point, then the $100 laptop project has failed in the $100 goal. A $1000 laptop is $100 with a $900 loss/subsidy, but who cares?)
PHP is great for its templating features, the ability to separate content from design, and its speed of development.
Um, sorry, could you show me which language more tightly couples content and design?
Binding content and design is what those web template languages do. It's why they're better than traditional CGI scripts for quick projects and crash and burn for large projects, unless you add something to manage the separation. That some people have managed to assemble frameworks that do sort of separate content and design as things you can add-on, is more a tribute to the frameworks and the framework designers than PHP; the design of PHP really fights that sort of thing, since it "wants" to re-parse everything involved with the page on every load. (I am aware they have since "fixed" that problem; my point is that they had to fix it, not that it was unfixable. With other structures the problem doesn't arise.)
(I'm sort of OK using such languages, but only when you can have backend code that isn't written in the template language. I use Perl and Apache::ASP, where the web app is backed by Perl modules that do all the heavy lifting and can actually be used outside of the webserver, too. The ASP/PHP-like code just does final formatting and display. The "design" is in the Perl modules and the "display" is in the ASP/PHP-like code.)
The term "addiction" is usually considered perjorative, and is not used for necessities of life such as food, water, oxygen, and the temperature range our biology expects.
Some careful consideration will reveal that all four of those things are in fact just expressions of energy patterns in mass. One of them happens to be completely taken care of by the biosphere, but that makes it no less true.
Further thought points out that, in the immortal words of CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system." (The quote may be oddly sourced but it's still very true.)
"Oil addiction" is probably not the best way of thinking about it, but has some truth. "Energy addiction" is a complete pointless way of thinking about our energy needs. The "solution" to energy addiction is death. You're much better off thinking in terms of balancing our supply and demand, growing the true supply while shrinking the demand.
The universe is awash in energy, still flush in its youth.
Given that my hand held calculator is more powerfull than the 2 room large ENIAC of yesteryear I would not be surprised if in the future fusion reactors could be minituarized to fit in cars.
Bad analogy. Nothing has had the improvement curve computing has had. Because of fusion's requirement for mind-bogglingly high temperatures and pressures to work, you're just not going to be able to shrink it very much. (Nanotech might help in building the reactors by providing advanced materials, but there are some things you simply need mass for.)
Unless we discover a cold fusion process that produces usable energy, this isn't going to change. I'm not prepared to say that's impossible, but we're currently short of prospects on that. (But with some room left for discovery; after all there are some cold fusion processes, they just don't come anywhere near break even.)
You didn't address any of my issues.
You didn't raise any particularly interesting ones!
That's my point.
Why should I "address" your uninteresting issues? Your personal lack of faith in engineering is your problem. I just didn't think it should go unchallenged.
Just take a look at Windows for an example of what happens when you try to incrementally evolve something like this: 6 years with basically no innovation because updating anything is so slow and difficult.
With respect, you've mistaken "incremental" for "maintaining backwards compatibility at all costs". They're not the same at all, and I'd never suggest trying to maintain any sort of backwards compatibility in this context.
Your post makes complete sense if you make that substitution.
I routinely make incremental changes to my software that aren't backwards compatible. Often (and increasingly) my unit tests tell me what things I may have forgotten about that use it. I just finished one just before checking Slashdot for a break. In fact, more often than not I don't keep backwards compatibility; I've really been trending towards the thought lately that it's a trap, not a good idea, looking great in the short term and completely killing you in the long term.
A better comparision is IBM. Used to be completely dominant, looked to be crashing for a while, eventually came back as a company than only be described as wise, something very unusual for a company, and experienced great success once again as a player in a larger industry, instead of depending on domination.
Or at least in the case of Nintendo, potentially wise; we'll have to see how this turns out. But if it turns out well, I'd say it's an appropriate word.
Batteries have always been nasty, from the very first lead-acid batteries on to today.
Lithium-ion batteries, for instance, have the habit of exploding when charged. It took a lot of engineering and electronics wrapped around the charging of lithium-ion batteries to make them safe for consumer use.
But when's the last time you heard about a lithium-ion battery exploding on someone? I haven't heard about it in a while. And it's been even longer since I've heard about it when it wasn't the person's fault.
There are "questions to be answered", sure, but you sort of act like this is news. I could equally write a "questions to be answered" post about automobiles, starting with the impossibility of storing gasoline correctly. There are people who can answer those questions called "engineers", and while I wouldn't jump on the first iteration of the technology, the battery field has a pretty good track record overall. If it comes out for consumer use, it'll almost certainly be very safe after six months on the market.
Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter -we- are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself. - Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye"
:)
Complete list of quotes here, although for full effect you really need to hear some of them. The voice acting on Alpha Centauri is among the best ever done for video games. Especially the Ascent to Transcendance sequence, though I find I prefer the second-to-last project to the last one.
I'd post these, but every time I do my bandwidth gets shot all to hell.