The Motorola L2 might be close to what you want. No camera, no mp3 player. It does do bluetooth and USB synching to a few simple PDA apps, but you can safely ignore those. And it's cheap; I got mine deeply discounted as part of my Cingular renewal, but I believe the list price was around $150.
Is it just me, or is it ironic that people are advocating the blocking of ads on Slashdot, which is quite clearly (at least in part) supported by banner advertising?
Slashdot has ads?
...Oh, right. I blocked them with adblock two years ago.
The problem is that I don't believe that building self-replicating probes is a hard problem on the timescale of interest here. It's very difficult for me to imagine humans not solving it within a couple of centuries, if our civilization hangs together well enough to support continued research and technology development. Perhaps I'm completely wrong about this, of course.
The other problem is that I don't believe in explanations requiring all civilizations to exercise prudence, self-restraint, and altruism. Given how spotty the record of the one civilization we know about is on these virtues, it's by no means apparent why others would be saints by comparison. And, of course, all it takes is one less-responsible civilization to fill the galaxy with Von Neumann machines over the span of a million years or so.
If we posit that no such irresponsible civilization has existed, we're left with two potential explanations: Either the total number of civilizations is quite low, or any civilization that reaches the point of being able to build successful VN machines is inevitably responsible by that time (e.g., because the ones that remain irresponsible with precursor technologies always destroy themselves in short order). But again, the counter-counterargument is that it only takes one civilization successfully building VN machines to fill the galaxy with them, which leads us back to the low-civilization-count model.
All of this is completely speculative, of course. We have two data points to go on: the nature of our own technological civilization, and the absence of evidence for others. That's not a good foundation on which to build a reliable theoretical structure.
The trouble is that all you need is one race making one set of reasonably efficient self-replicating probes any time before about a million years ago (which is a fraction of a thousandth of the age of our galaxy). If that had ever happened, even once, you wouldn't be able to walk down the street without tripping over the damn things, figuratively speaking.
The only scenarios that make sense to me are:
(1) We're alone, or very nearly alone. For whatever reason, techonological civilizations are
incredibly rare. Working from just one example, we have no idea how big a statistical fluke
we might be.
(2) As posited by e.g. Greg Bear, the galaxy is an incredibly dangerous place, filled with very
advanced races locked in vicious, mortal combat with one another. Any new technology-using
race that gets noticed is wiped out before it can become a threat. The radio signals we've
already sent out into the galaxy mean we are doomed.
I'd be very pleased to find out that some other alternative is true, of course.
Absolutely right. And this design has worked very well for efficiently exploring the entire surface of the Earth.
However, human bodies as they currently exist are not well suited to interstellar travel using any technique which seems likely to be practical. My view is that we will have to heavily modify ourselves, or let machines do the job, or some combination of those approaches.
I've always wondered why such charges aren't trivially dismissed on the grounds that the hunter shot a robot, not a deer. It's like when someone gets busted for propositioning a teenager online who turns out to have been a cop; why isn't a valid defense "Show me the teenager I'm accused of propositioning"? The whole thing makes no sense to me.
Better yet, line the insides of the cars with several layers of frozen pizzas; the passengers can eat them from the outside in as they pass through the radiation belts.
That's why you never let date/time components get past the outermost layer of I/O. Internally, everything should be either a Julian Day (or modified JD) for date-resolution values, or an epoch second or millisecond for values of those resolutions.
I'm astonished that anyone ever builds time processing and storage systems any other way.
The effects of gravity and of relative motion. If you put the object at the point where there was no net gravitational force, it would travel in a straight line -- which would cause it to move toward the smaller body, which is moving in a circle around the larger body. The L1 point location is offset toward the larger body from the zero-gravity point, so that the combined effect of gravity and orbital motion result in no *relative* motion between the three bodies, as viewed in a rotating frame of reference.
Actually, it's not quite accurate to say that gravity cancels at these points; rather the net effect of gravity from the two larger bodies and the centrifugal pseudoforce resulting from orbital motion of the third body balance in such a way as to maintain the object in the same position relative to the two larger bodies.
Small changes can be devastating. Example: why does XHTML backslashes in hr or br tags. These are completely unnecessary requirements.
Those aren't backslashes \, they are forward slashes/. And they're required because XHTML is a standards-compliant XML binding, and all valid XML documents must be well-formed. Well-formedness includes the requirement that all elements be closed. The <tag/> syntax is just shorthand for <tag></tag>.
This requirement isn't just bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. Ensuring that all (valid) XML documents follow rules like this is what makes them so easy to parse quickly and unambiguously.
XHML did not take off because who would want to wade through thousands of pages in HTML written during the last decade and make those changes?
There are automated tools (e.g., Tidy) that will do most of the work for static pages. But there really aren't "thousands of pages" to deal with; the HTML to XHTML conversion process is pretty simple.
The real problems with XHTML are:
It makes some common idioms, notably including embedded Javascript code, much more awkward to write correctly.
There's no payoff for most sites.
Item 2 is the real killer. If everyone is happily parsing "tag soup" HTML, which is often not compliant to any standard, why jump through the hoops (however easy those jumps might be) to comply with a standard that brings no immediate benefit?
The phrase "begs the question" does not mean "demands that we ask the question". Rather, "begging the question" is a type of logical fallacy. Modern usage clearly includes the first sense, but in my view this is an aberration which should be resisted; the correct sense of the phrase is too useful to lose without a fight.
The most common way I discover new music is hearing it being played -- in a cafe or store, typically -- deciding I like the sound, and remembering a unique-sounding snippet of lyrics to Google later. That gives me the title and artist. From there I can buy the track on Rhapsody, or even buy the CD.
If they shut down the lyrics sites, I will buy much less music. Nice work there, RIAA.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like *your* god has a thing for BDSM, dude.
As a friend of mine once remarked, "Christianity is nothing but institutionalized Stockholm Syndrome."
I believe it was Roger Schank who was once asked "Do you think computers will ever be as intelligent as humans?" and replied "Yes. Briefly."
"You're full of skit."
But it would light a nanowatt bulb for seven hundred billion hours -- that's nearly eighty million years! Isn't science amazing?
The Motorola L2 might be close to what you want. No camera, no mp3 player. It does do bluetooth and USB synching to a few simple PDA apps, but you can safely ignore those. And it's cheap; I got mine deeply discounted as part of my Cingular renewal, but I believe the list price was around $150.
Slashdot has ads?
Rather than giving Gosling the order of Canada, wouldn't it be better form for Gosling and Canada to extend a common implementation of Comparable?
The problem is that I don't believe that building self-replicating probes is a hard problem on the timescale of interest here. It's very difficult for me to imagine humans not solving it within a couple of centuries, if our civilization hangs together well enough to support continued research and technology development. Perhaps I'm completely wrong about this, of course.
The other problem is that I don't believe in explanations requiring all civilizations to exercise prudence, self-restraint, and altruism. Given how spotty the record of the one civilization we know about is on these virtues, it's by no means apparent why others would be saints by comparison. And, of course, all it takes is one less-responsible civilization to fill the galaxy with Von Neumann machines over the span of a million years or so.
If we posit that no such irresponsible civilization has existed, we're left with two potential explanations: Either the total number of civilizations is quite low, or any civilization that reaches the point of being able to build successful VN machines is inevitably responsible by that time (e.g., because the ones that remain irresponsible with precursor technologies always destroy themselves in short order). But again, the counter-counterargument is that it only takes one civilization successfully building VN machines to fill the galaxy with them, which leads us back to the low-civilization-count model.
All of this is completely speculative, of course. We have two data points to go on: the nature of our own technological civilization, and the absence of evidence for others. That's not a good foundation on which to build a reliable theoretical structure.
The trouble is that all you need is one race making one set of reasonably efficient self-replicating probes any time before about a million years ago (which is a fraction of a thousandth of the age of our galaxy). If that had ever happened, even once, you wouldn't be able to walk down the street without tripping over the damn things, figuratively speaking.
The only scenarios that make sense to me are:
(1) We're alone, or very nearly alone. For whatever reason, techonological civilizations are
incredibly rare. Working from just one example, we have no idea how big a statistical fluke
we might be.
(2) As posited by e.g. Greg Bear, the galaxy is an incredibly dangerous place, filled with very
advanced races locked in vicious, mortal combat with one another. Any new technology-using
race that gets noticed is wiped out before it can become a threat. The radio signals we've
already sent out into the galaxy mean we are doomed.
I'd be very pleased to find out that some other alternative is true, of course.
Absolutely right. And this design has worked very well for efficiently exploring the entire surface of the Earth.
However, human bodies as they currently exist are not well suited to interstellar travel using any technique which seems likely to be practical. My view is that we will have to heavily modify ourselves, or let machines do the job, or some combination of those approaches.
We do; you are an example of such a device. :)
You'd wait until you had the technology to make self-replicating probes, and the galaxy could potentially be explored in thousands of years.
Bingo. As usual, Wikipedia has a good article on the topic.
I've always wondered why such charges aren't trivially dismissed on the grounds that the hunter shot a robot, not a deer. It's like when someone gets busted for propositioning a teenager online who turns out to have been a cop; why isn't a valid defense "Show me the teenager I'm accused of propositioning"? The whole thing makes no sense to me.
The times when a group of civilians could contend with an equally numerous group of soldiers are long gone.
Absolutely. But combat-capable civilians outnumber soldiers and police in our country by at least fifty to one. That tends to even the odds a bit.
To quote (from memory) a German commander on the Easter front during WWII: "Each of our tanks could beat five of theirs. We kept meeting six."
Given that we still "dial" numbers on phones of all types, I would guess nomenclature will prove pretty sticky in this field.
Better yet, line the insides of the cars with several layers of frozen pizzas; the passengers can eat them from the outside in as they pass through the radiation belts.
That's why you never let date/time components get past the outermost layer of I/O. Internally, everything should be either a Julian Day (or modified JD) for date-resolution values, or an epoch second or millisecond for values of those resolutions.
I'm astonished that anyone ever builds time processing and storage systems any other way.
The effects of gravity and of relative motion. If you put the object at the point where there was no net gravitational force, it would travel in a straight line -- which would cause it to move toward the smaller body, which is moving in a circle around the larger body. The L1 point location is offset toward the larger body from the zero-gravity point, so that the combined effect of gravity and orbital motion result in no *relative* motion between the three bodies, as viewed in a rotating frame of reference.
It really is an important distinction.
Actually, it's not quite accurate to say that gravity cancels at these points; rather the net effect of gravity from the two larger bodies and the centrifugal pseudoforce resulting from orbital motion of the third body balance in such a way as to maintain the object in the same position relative to the two larger bodies.
This requirement isn't just bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. Ensuring that all (valid) XML documents follow rules like this is what makes them so easy to parse quickly and unambiguously.
There are automated tools (e.g., Tidy) that will do most of the work for static pages. But there really aren't "thousands of pages" to deal with; the HTML to XHTML conversion process is pretty simple.The real problems with XHTML are:
- It makes some common idioms, notably including embedded Javascript code, much more awkward to write correctly.
- There's no payoff for most sites.
Item 2 is the real killer. If everyone is happily parsing "tag soup" HTML, which is often not compliant to any standard, why jump through the hoops (however easy those jumps might be) to comply with a standard that brings no immediate benefit?What exactly is a "grippy" contribution? Is it a Hungarian idiom, maybe?
Of course, in Hungarian notation the name will end up being brdgColbert.
The phrase "begs the question" does not mean "demands that we ask the question". Rather, "begging the question" is a type of logical fallacy. Modern usage clearly includes the first sense, but in my view this is an aberration which should be resisted; the correct sense of the phrase is too useful to lose without a fight.
Someone needs to make it spell out "John Keats."
The most common way I discover new music is hearing it being played -- in a cafe or store, typically -- deciding I like the sound, and remembering a unique-sounding snippet of lyrics to Google later. That gives me the title and artist. From there I can buy the track on Rhapsody, or even buy the CD.
If they shut down the lyrics sites, I will buy much less music. Nice work there, RIAA.