The way, I see it, Terra (i prefer the Latin terminology) is our one and only food producing eco-system. While it may be possible to grow crops in orbital greenhouse environments, it would be a lot more difficult, expensive and dangerous, besides taking up a great deal of bio-system resources (atmospheric controls, bio-containment of organisms found in soils and hydroponics, etc). It will be much easier to use Terra for food production and space for Industry.
You're exactly right, that is if you don't take the continued advancing of technology into account.
We'll have full-blown nanotechnology in 5-20 years. We'll be able to create boxes the size of your microwave, into which you shovel dirt, trash or used pinball machine parts, and press a button and it converts them into a steak, or any other food.
Once we've got that we don't need plants or animals any more. Not that we should get rid of them -- but imagine, a future where to survive, we do not need to kill other living creates? I find it fascinating.
I have two thoughts on this technology. The first is that there need to be safeguards against enemy troops stripping dead soldiers and either gaining access to our information, or corrupting it.
The second is that I see this as another step on the way toward a completely human-less battlefield. Which is a great thing; let the robots fight it out. The engineer in me loves it (I drive an automatic because I feel the tool should do the work.;-)
and remember folks the simulation does not have to run in real time!
Lots of peopel are saying this, and I agree, but I agree the opposite: I believe the simulation runs many times faster than real time.
At first, processing power is slow and you must run simulations slower than real time. However, technology progresses, and eventually the simulation can be run parallel to real time. (As others have said, the simulation does not have to calculate everything, just as Quake doesn't calculate walls and objects you can't see; also, judicious use of lossless compression can keep the memory requirements down; instead of 1 trillion atoms, it just says "chair", etc.)
With the simulation running in parallel, you can simulate the current world and develop technology, while the real world is developing different technology. And of course you can run multiple simulations, so technology (and processing power) will expand much faster than before.
Note that this could be the case even with simulations running slower than real time -- they can also be used to work on advancing technology, because their efforts can be coordinated with the real world.
So at some point we'll have enough processing power to simulate faster than real time. And then technology will really take off, because we'll be able to perform experiments "in the blink of an eye" which would have taken years or perhaps millenia to perform "in the real world."
Of course, it would be nice to eventually be able to make it to that "real world"...
My favorite anecdote is from Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's The Illuminatus Trilogy in which a minor character at one point states, "I've realized that we're all living in a book, and I think I've figured a way out."
He's never heard from again.
Tiny detail but it stayed with me all these years. I want out.
Linus, would you please scan in the NDA and post it for us to review?
Thanks,
Slashdotters
Nvidia driver problems in 1.4b
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have an Nvidia GeForce 2 Ti, am running Windows 2000 Advanced Server, and upgraded to 1.4b when it came out (around 2003/05/08). I changed nothing else on my system, and all of a sudden the video started acting screwy. StarCraft wouldn't start up until I exited Mozilla; right-click on the desktop and select Properties, then the Settings tab and it showed the screen dimensions at 9999x9999; DOS Prompts couldn't go full-screen; some icons/screen elements wouldn't repaint properly.
I discussed this with the Mozilla developers and they said they had never seen the issue, and that it must be something else on my machine.
So I downgraded to 1.3, and the problem went away. It's most definitely something to do with Mozilla 1.4b.
Has anyone else experienced this problem? And if so, does 1.4 RC1 have it?
It seems to me that a website operator that provides an open forum for discussion should be no more at fault for the content of patron conversation than a restaurant owner should when people sit and chat there.
Exactly. And Slashdot should not be responsible when I tell you all that it's easy to circumvent the license key protection in Microsoft Office 97: just hold down the "1" key until you hear the bell (i.e., the input field fills up) -- then hit Enter.
Of course the "developer codes" changed in future versions, but I still use 97 sometimes.
It's a discussion forum, nothing more nothing less. The operator is "making a profit" because he sells advertising but that's the only thing he sells, and that shouldn't get him in trouble.
I'm very interested to see where this one will lead us; others are talking about Australian law being that the Internet's jurisdiction is in the country of the reader, so perhaps DirecTV will go after Canada from Australia. We certainly live in interesting times!
Do you have any plans to create something like a Freenet "plugin" so that the tracker (and perhaps even one copy of the file being shared) could be hosted on Freenet, instead of on an identifiable (and thus prosecutable) server?
I love BitTorrent, it maxes out my cable modem at 200 down, 30 up; no other method of downloading can fill the pipe.
The only problem is the reliability of certain sites with content -- which I'm sure you have no relationship with; but if BitTorrent could piggyback off Freenet, it might go a long way toward improving the stability of these sites.
Also, are you going to do anything with the bittorrent.com site? (That's the one Mozilla "suggests" first when I start typing "bittorrent" in the URL bar.)
You find the terrorist, hunt them down, and get them - you don't randomly start throwing missiles at other countries.
I just recently read an old Niven/Pournelle novel, Lucifer's Hammer -- and it had the scenario where a comet strikes the earth. It breaks up into multiple pieces, and does a ton of damage.
One small plotline in the novel was that China and Russia went to war, and started throwing nukes at each other. Granted, this is a work of fiction...
I highly recommend the book. Very good character development, especially the mailman and the senator (and the dude who discovers the comet before it hits). Not science fiction in the sense of lasers and spaceships; it's more of an "alternate present" story.
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could drink you under the table
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel
There's nothing Nietszche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist
Socrates himself was permanently pissed
John Stuart Mill of his own free will
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill
Plato they say could stick it away
Half a crate of whiskey every day
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle
Hobbes was fond of his Dram
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart
"I drink, therefore I am !"
Yes Socrates himself is particularly missed
A lovely little thinker
But a bugger when he's pissed.
(Note that they said "take you under the table" when memory says it's obviously "drink"...)
I don't know how Matrix Revolutions is supposed to end, but I hope it's not a damn luddite ending where the Matrix is shutdown after the people inside are forced to take the blue pill and wake up to a more "real" reality, where most learn that truth is shit, and ignorance is bliss.
Um, the blue pill keeps you inside. Remember Cypher's quote from the first movie, "Why, oh why didn't I take the blue pill?"
I like the similar and parallel story which got a link here a few months ago, The Metamorphasis of Prime Intellect. Without giving too much away, the story has a computer which gains god-like powers and, being programmed with Asimov's Laws, actively prevents humans from dying. So they evolve "contracts" in which they can turn off Prime Intellect's watchful eye and experience pain and almost "die" but the contract ends upon death and Prime Intellect revives them.
Very well written story. The humans can create whatever worlds or vistas they can imagine, and can change their bodies to be animals or zombies or anything, really. As you said, "A universe for every mind."
It is great that they are putting the source online, if they actually do it. But, the fact of the matter is that they are only doing this after being called on the carpet by the FSF. They had no intention of doing this before.
IANAL, but IIRC the GPL simply states that you must distribute the source to those customers who request it. So they don't have to put the source online -- they just need to make it available to their customers.
I don't know how OpenTV is giving/selling the binaries to their customers; if they have downloads available on the internet then I would assume they should post the sources. But a cursory view of their web site shows that this doesn't appear to be the case.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if, behind the scenes, DARPA says something like "well, members of Congress will, of course, be exempt!", at which point Congress will immediately approve it.
Actually, they should spin it the other way: all government employees will be the first ones to be monitored 24/7.
This would go a long way toward reducing corruption, and ensuring that citizens treated by these government officials are treated fairly (on or off the job).
Of course, this is the first step toward replacing government employees with machines, and (in my best Kent Brockman) I for one welcome our robot masters.
Sometimes it's better to be the wizard than the king.
Microsoft is staying out of the picture, pulling the strings to fund the lawsuit. Perhaps they're even providing legal counsel to SCO (how would we know?).
And although the current administration won't touch them, they're probably looking further down the line -- the Democrats may get back in power, and they'll want to have been seen as a somewhat passive observer instead of a fighter. That's why Microsoft will not purchase SCO.
Although as another poster said, they probably will have at least one more "licensing payment" if SCO starts running out of money before the lawsuit ends. It's in Microsoft's best interest for this to sit in the courts as long as possible, since their sales force can then badger customers who are considering Linux: "You don't want to be sued by SCO also, do you? Go with the safe choice. Microsoft."
There's no anonymity here, and the only reason sites like torrentse.cx are around at all is that the RIAA/MPAA haven't noticed them yet. Once they do, kiss 'em goodbye.
<SMOOCH>
Check it out, the site says "what" in various shades of green on black.
Windows, being the beast that it is, eventually crashes and the bittorrent app goes down along with it.
Are you using a LinkSys network card? If so, your crashes may be because of BitTorrent. When I would open more than 1 torrent it would blue-screen. Someone on a/. thread showed me the light, just install separate drivers and you're good to go.
Since then I've had up to 7 torrents DLing at once with no problems.
Slashdot Mirror
(I didn't give the exact number for privacy reasons; "Thing 1" is not the name my parents gave me.
I mean, attention to details...
Wait, where's Planet Express? Damn I love Futurama...
You can look up your ZIP+4 code here.
Enjoy!
You're exactly right, that is if you don't take the continued advancing of technology into account.
We'll have full-blown nanotechnology in 5-20 years. We'll be able to create boxes the size of your microwave, into which you shovel dirt, trash or used pinball machine parts, and press a button and it converts them into a steak, or any other food.
Once we've got that we don't need plants or animals any more. Not that we should get rid of them -- but imagine, a future where to survive, we do not need to kill other living creates? I find it fascinating.
The second is that I see this as another step on the way toward a completely human-less battlefield. Which is a great thing; let the robots fight it out. The engineer in me loves it (I drive an automatic because I feel the tool should do the work. ;-)
Lots of peopel are saying this, and I agree, but I agree the opposite: I believe the simulation runs many times faster than real time.
At first, processing power is slow and you must run simulations slower than real time. However, technology progresses, and eventually the simulation can be run parallel to real time. (As others have said, the simulation does not have to calculate everything, just as Quake doesn't calculate walls and objects you can't see; also, judicious use of lossless compression can keep the memory requirements down; instead of 1 trillion atoms, it just says "chair", etc.)
With the simulation running in parallel, you can simulate the current world and develop technology, while the real world is developing different technology. And of course you can run multiple simulations, so technology (and processing power) will expand much faster than before.
Note that this could be the case even with simulations running slower than real time -- they can also be used to work on advancing technology, because their efforts can be coordinated with the real world.
So at some point we'll have enough processing power to simulate faster than real time. And then technology will really take off, because we'll be able to perform experiments "in the blink of an eye" which would have taken years or perhaps millenia to perform "in the real world."
Of course, it would be nice to eventually be able to make it to that "real world"...
My favorite anecdote is from Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's The Illuminatus Trilogy in which a minor character at one point states, "I've realized that we're all living in a book, and I think I've figured a way out."
He's never heard from again.
Tiny detail but it stayed with me all these years. I want out.
Linus, would you please scan in the NDA and post it for us to review?
Thanks,
Slashdotters
I discussed this with the Mozilla developers and they said they had never seen the issue, and that it must be something else on my machine.
So I downgraded to 1.3, and the problem went away. It's most definitely something to do with Mozilla 1.4b.
Has anyone else experienced this problem? And if so, does 1.4 RC1 have it?
Exactly. And Slashdot should not be responsible when I tell you all that it's easy to circumvent the license key protection in Microsoft Office 97: just hold down the "1" key until you hear the bell (i.e., the input field fills up) -- then hit Enter.
Of course the "developer codes" changed in future versions, but I still use 97 sometimes.
It's a discussion forum, nothing more nothing less. The operator is "making a profit" because he sells advertising but that's the only thing he sells, and that shouldn't get him in trouble.
I'm very interested to see where this one will lead us; others are talking about Australian law being that the Internet's jurisdiction is in the country of the reader, so perhaps DirecTV will go after Canada from Australia. We certainly live in interesting times!
I love BitTorrent, it maxes out my cable modem at 200 down, 30 up; no other method of downloading can fill the pipe.
The only problem is the reliability of certain sites with content -- which I'm sure you have no relationship with; but if BitTorrent could piggyback off Freenet, it might go a long way toward improving the stability of these sites.
Also, are you going to do anything with the bittorrent.com site? (That's the one Mozilla "suggests" first when I start typing "bittorrent" in the URL bar.)
One small plotline in the novel was that China and Russia went to war, and started throwing nukes at each other. Granted, this is a work of fiction...
I highly recommend the book. Very good character development, especially the mailman and the senator (and the dude who discovers the comet before it hits). Not science fiction in the sense of lasers and spaceships; it's more of an "alternate present" story.
Don't know about you, but I came from a pink one...
I'll be here all week, folks.
Ah, Heidegger...
(Note that they said "take you under the table" when memory says it's obviously "drink"...)It appears that thread was pulled from that site by the moderators. For a discussion (from apparently a Filipino view), see here.
Um, the blue pill keeps you inside. Remember Cypher's quote from the first movie, "Why, oh why didn't I take the blue pill?"
I like the similar and parallel story which got a link here a few months ago, The Metamorphasis of Prime Intellect. Without giving too much away, the story has a computer which gains god-like powers and, being programmed with Asimov's Laws, actively prevents humans from dying. So they evolve "contracts" in which they can turn off Prime Intellect's watchful eye and experience pain and almost "die" but the contract ends upon death and Prime Intellect revives them.
Very well written story. The humans can create whatever worlds or vistas they can imagine, and can change their bodies to be animals or zombies or anything, really. As you said, "A universe for every mind."
Really? From my experience it's almost always the students doing most of the work.
The faculty is there to guide them, come up with the ideas, etc. -- but they use cheap student labor to get the job done.
IANAL, but IIRC the GPL simply states that you must distribute the source to those customers who request it. So they don't have to put the source online -- they just need to make it available to their customers.
I don't know how OpenTV is giving/selling the binaries to their customers; if they have downloads available on the internet then I would assume they should post the sources. But a cursory view of their web site shows that this doesn't appear to be the case.
Actually, they should spin it the other way: all government employees will be the first ones to be monitored 24/7.
This would go a long way toward reducing corruption, and ensuring that citizens treated by these government officials are treated fairly (on or off the job).
Of course, this is the first step toward replacing government employees with machines, and (in my best Kent Brockman) I for one welcome our robot masters.
Youth Helping Betray Terrorism.
Yes, YHBT. By the government. Whee!
Wow, I post a true comment and it's moderated flamebait. Guess you shouldn't point out the hypocrisy here.
Microsoft is staying out of the picture, pulling the strings to fund the lawsuit. Perhaps they're even providing legal counsel to SCO (how would we know?).
And although the current administration won't touch them, they're probably looking further down the line -- the Democrats may get back in power, and they'll want to have been seen as a somewhat passive observer instead of a fighter. That's why Microsoft will not purchase SCO.
Although as another poster said, they probably will have at least one more "licensing payment" if SCO starts running out of money before the lawsuit ends. It's in Microsoft's best interest for this to sit in the courts as long as possible, since their sales force can then badger customers who are considering Linux: "You don't want to be sued by SCO also, do you? Go with the safe choice. Microsoft."
Unless of course we're talking about Microsoft; then we rant and rave and scream FUD and vaporware.
<SMOOCH>
Check it out, the site says "what" in various shades of green on black.
Something like, "the matrix strikes back?"
Are you using a LinkSys network card? If so, your crashes may be because of BitTorrent. When I would open more than 1 torrent it would blue-screen. Someone on a /. thread showed me the light, just install separate drivers and you're good to go.
Since then I've had up to 7 torrents DLing at once with no problems.
You can read about it here.