What planet do you live on? USB doesn't carry enough power to be useful: I have 11 USB devices, 10 have their own power bricks and cords. Now even the damn mouse has a power brick, leaving the keyboard as the only USB-powered device.
The KVM, Hub, Scanner, Inkjet Printer, Laser Printer, Label Printer, Speakers, Palm Cradle, HD, and Zip Drive all have bricks and cables. My digital camera doesn't have a power cable, but can't charge its batteries off USB either.
My iPod mini charges off the firewire cable, which is genius. All external devices and data busses should work this way.
I'd be more than happy to accept a heavier CPU (for the larger power supply), thicker cable, and bigger connectors in order to be able to run only one daisy-chained cable from device to device.
There are 60+ cables and FIVE full power strips behind my computer desk. Last time I rewired it took two days to get it organized. Combining data and power would be far more useful to me than wireless USB.
In this grand game of misery poker we're playing, I'll raise your Scientologists a full house of Promise Keepers. They're an ultrarightwing fundamentalist group that brings troubled men back home to their families... to dominate them. I had no idea.
Boss bought two $18k motorcycles that summer, yet paid his degreed engineers $22k per year. The Boss's wife (payroll) never spoke unless spoken to, even with the interns. She sat on the floor, silent, at social events at their home while he cracked sexist jokes at her expense.
They hired me for ~$8/hr (I was naive); but promised me a $1500 bonus at the end of the summer. I spent the whole summer writing free websites for their co's friends and family: Boss's church, CFO's dad's company, VP's golf team, etc. They turned down a $20k NBA team web contract and a major up-and-coming webzine while I did these things.
They wanted me to turn them into a full-blown fractional T1 business ISP with two 1988 vintage '386s and a copy of SCO UNIX. It didn't have cc, since the "dev package" was $2000 extra, no docs, and I wasn't allowed to call tech support at $150/hr. These relic (200 Mb HD) were suppossed to handle user accounts, POP, BIND, FTP, and USENET. The webserver was a Quadra with WebStar- at least it ran.
I'll spare you the details of the e-commerce retail channel for cell phones they expected me to set up in two weeks with no information, contacts, budget, or staff. No secure webserver or POS credit card sysem, either, they were too expensive. These guys practically defined "faith-based business planning".
On my second-to-last day of work, Boss told me he was having trouble getting my bonus approved by the board, because I hadn't done any work that would bring them continuing revenue. All I could think about was that damn free website for his church; it had taken two weeks.
After several formal complaints and a legal filing that fall they sent me a "Christmas bonus" check for $250 which was subsequently stopped when I bitched. (Duh)
Who knows. Maybe it had pissed him off, my last day, when I parked in his favorite spot with a shiny new Darwin fish on my car. It felt good, though. Really good.
VB may be evil, but it can't touch what it replaced.
My worst programming job? 1991 - I had to build a lockable databasing/math/graphic app with full idiotproof GUI... in the original MS Excel "my code is a spreadsheet" macro language.
It took me a week to even figure that the language didn't really have variables. I'm not kidding. You put formulas in cells, and the formulas returned their results to those cells, just like in regular Excel sheets. Except that you didn't see the results or have any way of knowing this was happening, because code sheets (unlike data sheets) display the formula rather than the result. Then you gave that cell a name, and used that name like a variable. But the cell had to have a location in your code column. None of this was documented.
Instead, all the examples put the name of the variable in the column to the left of the code; the documentation seemed to imply that putting the name there created a variable you could use later on. On the contrary, that text in the left column was just a comment; to create the "variable" you had to name the appropriate code column cell using a menu option. Identifiers didn't appear in the code anywhere.
After two days of trial and error, I was able to write code with variables. Then the hard parts began.
Over 90% of the development time was spent just trying to deduce how the language worked.
More like a bathtub or eight. A typical 5' U.S. style home bathtub has a maximum fill before overflow of 50 gallons or a bit more. (Linked one holds 54 gallons).
1.5 tonnes of water, assuming metric tons, is ~396 gallons!
To the original "cynic" poster: If you have any familiarity with chemistry, materials science, or manufacturing, 1.5 tons of water really shouldn't suprise you. Nearly every material we use goes through some sort of refining or chemical process that involves at least two of: water (for quenching, washing, and/or solution chemistry), energy (for melting, refining, operating machinery), or fossil fuels as raw materials (most plastics and many solvents). By the time you've made the steel, gold, polymer resins, photoresists, glass, other metals, paint, etc. that goes into a PC, you've used a crapload of materials, the vast bulk of which were just used temporarily in processing. This is not in any way a blanket condemnation of PC manufacture - this is the nature of nearly all manufacturing. Modern industry is constantly seeking to minimize resource use because it saves money to do so.
I wonder how much water it takes to manufacture a bathtub?:-)
But really, this isn't "just scare tactics" as some have suggested. While true, all water is eventually recycled into the hydrosphere, the problems are vast ones of transient supply. Most water comes from rivers, and many of those in the developed world are already essentially dry by the time they reach the ocean, particularly near large population concentrations. Have you seen the Los Angeles river recently? The LA river and the colorado are both dry at the delta now. If LA grows to 14 million from 9, and San Diego and Vegas grow as well, there *will* be a very severe shortage problem without a major investment in new infrastructure for desalination, long distance piping, or conservation. My water pressure in Altadena (a northern LA suburb) is quite pitiful year-round, because they just can't keep a very tall head in the reservoir.
Sure, there's a practically infinite amount of water on the planet, but you can't make the rivers flow faster to produce more fresh water PER YEAR. Another large fraction of fresh water comes from aquifers, which do refill but in general much more slowly than they are being drained. If those empty, consumption has to drop significantly or another source must be found. The danger is having that happen in multiple places at once when the infrastructure isn't ready.
Aside from those, water has to be refined either from seawater via desalinization or sewage. Both of these systems require an awful lot of energy and infrastructure, and can carry their own risks or environmental costs. Desalinization is even more expensive in terms of energy if you live inland, because you have to burn energy to pump the water uphill. So much, in fact, that nobody really does this on a large scale yet - water supplies aren't yet short enough to justify that cost.
From a reasonable viewpoint, it's not scare tactics, it simply makes sense to be aware of how things work.
It is of course a totally reasonable point that the ongoing energy cost of operating four old computers on a continuous basis might outweigh the manufacturing costs of a single modern computer needed to replace them. You have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. If your task is processor limited, it may make sense to replace the machine. If not, though, as with a box I run in my basement just to provide a separate backup location, it makes far more sense to upgrade an 8 year old machine with a bigger hard drive than to manufacture/buy a whole new one. It only needs to transfer 5-30 MB of data per night in incremental backups, and spends most of the time asleep.
In both cases, the correct decision makes environmental
I mean all of this is supposed have happened prior to eps 4-6 so why does nearly everything seem to look more advanced? Bogus...
Actually I disagree with you, and I think this is one of the few things they did *well*. Lucas and others explained the idea behind the visuals:
Eps 1-2 occur at the height of a prosperous democratic republic. Lots of wealthy and decadent people around, so a lot of things are made to be much prettier and more stylish than is absolutely necessary for function: the Naboo spacecraft and weapons are the iMacs and iPods of their day. When you've got a happy, wealthy society, people spend effort on making stuff look pretty. (They also explain that Naboo has been peaceful and pastoral for so long that their weapons are primarily ceremonial and thus not very functional.)
The time period of Episodes 4-6 is after the galaxy's been controlled by a tyrannical totalitarian empire for an entire generation. Economic growth is stagnant, scientific growth is sliding backwards, very few people have disposable income, and the whole imperial ethos is utilitarian function over form. Most everything looks cold and practical rather than stylish and fun. It's the USSR in the late 1980's, or perhaps Afghanistan under the Taliban, rather than the U.S. in the early 21st century.
Economic and government differences lead to major differences in industrial design and style. We see it on Earth every day. It's also, of course, a very convenient way to leverage improvements in moviemaking technology and technique... make the movies about the prosperous Old Republic era after you finish the first ones. Very smart.
I more than recognize the problems everyone points out with the movies, but the visual design is one of the things I think they've done extremely well. They handled a multiple decade gap much better than, say, Star Trek TOS as compared to Enterprise. (Though granted a 35 year gap is a lot harder to work with).
Your problem is that from living in the western world for the last three decades, you assume progress always goes upward. History teaches otherwise. Compare Southern Europe during the peak of the Roman empire (~200 C.E.) to the same location during the dark ages (~700 C.E.). Or the Arab/Islamic world at the height of its' development to the fundamentalist regimes that have stifled it since then. Or China at the height of development before it isolated itself for the better part of a milennium and fell behind the rest of the world.
We're in a period of growth and development now. It may not be forever, who knows. Lucas' universe is really quite an accurate reflection (well, analogy) of historical reality.
P.S. Before the mac people jump on me for implying that Apple stuff is unnecessarily fancy, I'll point out that I think fashion/style is a *good* thing for a wealthy society to spend money/effort on, and I am in fact a devoted mac user verging on evangelist. Moreover, I think the money spent on macs is actually well returned in the features, functionality, and reliability of the hardware, the style is just the incidental result of a good industrial design team.
I've been fascinated with Maglev technology since I was a kid, though I admit I haven't followed it closely lately - I didn't know a functioning passenger transrapid had been built in China.
Anyway, I have long been extremely annoyed that Transrapid's maglev technology has been the one to catch on the fastest, because as I see it, it has some major drawbacks relative to other maglev designs.
The primary problem is that the transrapid system uses magnetic levitation in attraction mode -- meaning you're not floating mutually repelling magnets, you're wrapping a part of the train under the track and using magnetic attraction to pull it upward.
There are some huge basic problems with this strategy. To start with, magnetic attraction is dynamically unstable - the closer you get, the harder it pulls, until you stick to the track. Transrapid deals with this by detecting the gap and constantly adjusting the current to the electromagnets with a fast computer. Magnetic repulsion, on the other hand, is dynamically stable: float a magnet over the other one and it will simply sit there, so fast computer needed. The Japanese design functions this way: the train sits in a U-shaped track, repelled on three sides.
There are some other serious advantages of repulsion-mode maglev:
repulsion-mode trains maintain a gap of several inches between train and track, transrapid maintains a gap of about a centimeter. This means small bumps and flexes in the track (due to tides, thermal expansion, inexact design) get smoothed out much better by a repulsion-mode maglev. Consequently you don't have to build the track to such exacting specifications, making it much cheaper.
in attraction-mode trains, the track has to be powered to activate electromagnets along the entire length. In repulsion mode, coils embedded in the track are induced by the moving magnetic field of the train: totally passive track, no power required. A repulsion-mode maglev doesn't need to worry about power outages, and the track is cheaper to build and maintain.
The major downside of the repulsion design is that it requires superconducting electromagnets on the train, and they're very expensive (for now) and can cause interference problems if not properly shielded, as someone noted above. But I see that as a technological problem that will be solved eventually and it would be better to work on that now than to saddle ourselves with a standard that has the fundamental problems of attraction-mode maglev design. Sixty years down the road when superconducting magnets are cheap, we might really regret that.
There's another minor downside to repulsion maglev as well- it only levitates when the train is going fast enough to induce currents in the track, so the train has to settle onto wheels as it rolls into the station. (or have supplementary electromagnets in the station).
Both the Japanese and transrapid designs have one other problem: the tracks have to pre-define the angle of the train as it rounds corners (the japanese track is a square "u"). You determine the speed beforehand and angle the track so that the force vector on the passengers is "down" with respect to their butts. This means you can't change the speed of the train later without making it ride like a roller coaster, so no faster trains down the line, and no adjusting speed for current conditions. And it means you have to manufacture very carefully-designed track segments at precise and constantly-changing curvatures. You either have standard track segments and limit the curves you can build, or build a lot of custom track segments. This gets expensive.
IIRC, there was a design done by a team in the US two decades or so ago that used a curved U-shaped track in repulsion mode that had the benefits of the japanese de
Photoshop and Imageready, fine, you need Windows for that.
You do? Crap, that means I need to take a look under the hood of this predatory feline I've been driving and exorcise the win.dll that must be at its core. And here I thought this thing was keeping me safe from evil.
It's extremely hard to protect against these EMP weapons. f you have a single wire hanging outside your faraday cage/shielding, you can fry the circuitry inside. You'd need to carefully put everything in thick metal boxes with fully internal power supplies/batteries/generators and make sure all interconnects everywhere are 100% optical.
You liberal types need to understand, *getting people to like you is not the proper goal of a nation-state*. Getting people to behave is.
Getting people to behave... And you propose to do this how? With violence? Yeah, that works. Ask Israel.
Ten thousand years of history have shown over and over again that ratcheting up the violence in most cases leads to more and more violence. Ask the Isralis how well bombing houses has induced "good behavior" among the Palestinian insurgets, for one of several dozen recent examples. There are of course hateful idiots on both sides and so there will always be some violence until the religious hatred is somehow eliminated.
But every time both sides *refrain* from responding with violence, the attack rates go down. Every time one side responds with increased violence, the attack rates go up.
Ten thousand years of religion, philosophy, and folk wisdom have given us a lot of sayings like "turn the other cheek", "the stronger man walks away", and "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Ten thousand year of experience shows that trying to get people to "behave" by scaring them into it with violence never works for very long.
What you anti-liberal types need to realize is that ten thousand years of wisdom isn't total bullshit that can be happily ignored every time you're angry and your instinctive circuits, the lizard brain we all have, wants revenge. Being human has something to do with rising above our animal nature. Hawks somehow manage to turn ignoring wisdom into a virtue by going into masculine posturing mode and appealing to the other lizard brains around them.
I'm not some hippie peacenik who thinks all wars and all violence can be avoided. Certainly situations arise where a nation has no choice but to defend itself or risk extinction. WWII was a 20th-century example. Gulf War I was also, as far Kuwait was concerned. But diplomacy, guile, trade, interdependence, and nonviolent action have ended more threats and removed more dictators than wars have by an order of magnitude.
These things described here will actually be very useful weapons because they can disrupt organized warfare with very few deaths. No, they aren't very useful against guerrillas or terrorists. But in some other circumstances, they *do* give an option that kills fewer people while accomplishing many of the same goals.
'What if' we killed no Iraqis in Bush's war? Instead of 50,000 insurgents, how many hundreds of thousands of guerrilla fighters would we be facing now?
Well, given that estimates are that we killed somewhere in the range of 10,000 iraqi troops in the war, if your so-called 'logic' held up, we'd be facing 60,000 instead of 50,000. That's hardly make-or break. But of course the logic doesn't hold because violence begets resistance. If the US were invaded, regardless of reason, a whole lot of guys would be headed for the hills with guns. Why is it so hard to understand that Iraqis might react the same way?
But anyway, even with these EMP weapons, the only way to kill ZERO Iraqis is to not invade, because you can't occupy ground with EMPs. So to have zero casualties, we don't ivade. And if we hadn't invaded, we'd be facing ZERO insurgents...
You can't have it print it out and just drop it automatically into a bucket... otherwise hacked software can just change the printout as well as the electronic vote.
You have to print it out and have the machine hand it TO THE VOTER. Then the voter can verify that it's what she intended and drop the ballot into the backup ballot box.
There is one way to guarantee that this gets picked up by the mainstream media.
Some white hat who reads slashdot and who has Access on her computer needs to give five thousand votes to Cowboy Neal in the CA recall election two weeks from now. Not enough to actually screw up the election, but enough to prove to everyone that the system is insecure.
If that doesn't happen, then we're all stuck with the more subtle, believable vote hacks that unscrupulous people WILL be implementing.
I like audio tapes. The good thing about audio tapes is they have two sides. This gives you twice the capacity of any other format. Please give one counterexample.
5 1/4" floppies. Double-sided, and definitely better than audio cassette.
"You don't have to look too far to see that this is almost a direct copy of Quartz," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's vice president of marketing, referring to the Macintosh software that controls the computer's display.
Microsoft executives declined to take the bait. "We only showed glimpses of the future of Longhorn," said a Microsoft spokesman. "Wait until the fall when we'll go into more detail at the Professional Developers Conference."
Shortly afterwards, a memo:
FROM: Microsoft Spokesdroid TO: Bill Gates SUBJECT: New features
Majesty, They're on to us, but I think I bought some time. Tell the Longhorn guys to come up with 4-5 new features before the Developers Conf. and we're golden.
Suggestion: no paper clips with eyeballs this time. Maybe we can try automatically linking keywords to our sales partners' websites again, I think they've forgotten that one. Worth a try.
Re:The result was the programmed result.
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Digital Darwin
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· Score: 1
Having, in fact, read the code myself, and worked with it for three straight years, I can tell you that you are dead wrong.
These little programs do things we never, ever expected. And some things we don't even know how to control. They cheat! They take advantage of every element of the system that's possible in ways we sometimes don't even understand.
And they write their own code in ways no human ever could. I've had experiences where it takes upwards of an hour to understand a 20-instruction-long digital organism because the code is so twisted. Stuff no programmer could ever have written, not even the obfuscated code gurus.
Like any evolving organism, they'll do whatever it takes to get ahead.
Yeah, I'd been lazy about getting the new stuff on the site. The new site was 95% done in a different directory this morning when I saw the posting.
Check back now.
Where to get Avida
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Digital Darwin
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· Score: 3, Informative
For the record, I'm one of Dr. Adami's grad students in (The Digital Life Lab) at Caltech. Most of the programming is done at our sister lab in Michigan.
We recently released Avida version 2.0, with a new GUI and complete with god mode where you can inspect and edit the genome of any organism at any point.
We encourage you to play with Avida yourself. You can get information and a Mac OS X binary at:
Avida's Hompeage. Older versions for linux and windows are available there as well.
The intrepid can build the current version for OS X or Linux from source, please see Avida's Sourceforge Project. If you want the nice GUI, you'll need QT.
Other information about Avida, our lab's research, and artificial life in general can be found at:
1) Apple sets an MAP for all of their products. Resellers are not allowed to undercut that MAP; i.e. nobody can sell you a new mac for cheaper than list. It is my understanding that trying it can lose a reseller their license to sell Apple products.
2) The example prices they list aren't just under MAP, they're under wholesale. Said hypothetical reseller that "purchaseprogram.com" is buying from in bulk would be losing money on each unit.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm... no shit.
What planet do you live on? USB doesn't carry enough power to be useful: I have 11 USB devices, 10 have their own power bricks and cords. Now even the damn mouse has a power brick, leaving the keyboard as the only USB-powered device.
The KVM, Hub, Scanner, Inkjet Printer, Laser Printer, Label Printer, Speakers, Palm Cradle, HD, and Zip Drive all have bricks and cables. My digital camera doesn't have a power cable, but can't charge its batteries off USB either.
My iPod mini charges off the firewire cable, which is genius. All external devices and data busses should work this way.
I'd be more than happy to accept a heavier CPU (for the larger power supply), thicker cable, and bigger connectors in order to be able to run only one daisy-chained cable from device to device.
There are 60+ cables and FIVE full power strips behind my computer desk. Last time I rewired it took two days to get it organized. Combining data and power would be far more useful to me than wireless USB.
In this grand game of misery poker we're playing, I'll raise your Scientologists a full house of Promise Keepers. They're an ultrarightwing fundamentalist group that brings troubled men back home to their families ... to dominate them. I had no idea.
Boss bought two $18k motorcycles that summer, yet paid his degreed engineers $22k per year. The Boss's wife (payroll) never spoke unless spoken to, even with the interns. She sat on the floor, silent, at social events at their home while he cracked sexist jokes at her expense.
They hired me for ~$8/hr (I was naive); but promised me a $1500 bonus at the end of the summer. I spent the whole summer writing free websites for their co's friends and family: Boss's church, CFO's dad's company, VP's golf team, etc. They turned down a $20k NBA team web contract and a major up-and-coming webzine while I did these things.
They wanted me to turn them into a full-blown fractional T1 business ISP with two 1988 vintage '386s and a copy of SCO UNIX. It didn't have cc, since the "dev package" was $2000 extra, no docs, and I wasn't allowed to call tech support at $150/hr. These relic (200 Mb HD) were suppossed to handle user accounts, POP, BIND, FTP, and USENET. The webserver was a Quadra with WebStar- at least it ran.
I'll spare you the details of the e-commerce retail channel for cell phones they expected me to set up in two weeks with no information, contacts, budget, or staff. No secure webserver or POS credit card sysem, either, they were too expensive. These guys practically defined "faith-based business planning".
On my second-to-last day of work, Boss told me he was having trouble getting my bonus approved by the board, because I hadn't done any work that would bring them continuing revenue. All I could think about was that damn free website for his church; it had taken two weeks.
After several formal complaints and a legal filing that fall they sent me a "Christmas bonus" check for $250 which was subsequently stopped when I bitched. (Duh)
Who knows. Maybe it had pissed him off, my last day, when I parked in his favorite spot with a shiny new Darwin fish on my car. It felt good, though. Really good.
VB may be evil, but it can't touch what it replaced.
... in the original MS Excel "my code is a spreadsheet" macro language.
My worst programming job? 1991 - I had to build a lockable databasing/math/graphic app with full idiotproof GUI
It took me a week to even figure that the language didn't really have variables. I'm not kidding. You put formulas in cells, and the formulas returned their results to those cells, just like in regular Excel sheets. Except that you didn't see the results or have any way of knowing this was happening, because code sheets (unlike data sheets) display the formula rather than the result. Then you gave that cell a name, and used that name like a variable. But the cell had to have a location in your code column. None of this was documented.
Instead, all the examples put the name of the variable in the column to the left of the code; the documentation seemed to imply that putting the name there created a variable you could use later on. On the contrary, that text in the left column was just a comment; to create the "variable" you had to name the appropriate code column cell using a menu option. Identifiers didn't appear in the code anywhere.
After two days of trial and error, I was able to write code with variables. Then the hard parts began.
Over 90% of the development time was spent just trying to deduce how the language worked.
From my point of view, VB is a godsend.
Space suits for sea bass are cheaper to manufacture.
Ok, I did say a bath tub or two.
:-)
More like a bathtub or eight. A typical 5' U.S. style home bathtub has a maximum fill before overflow of 50 gallons or a bit more. (Linked one holds 54 gallons).
1.5 tonnes of water, assuming metric tons, is ~396 gallons!
To the original "cynic" poster: If you have any familiarity with chemistry, materials science, or manufacturing, 1.5 tons of water really shouldn't suprise you. Nearly every material we use goes through some sort of refining or chemical process that involves at least two of: water (for quenching, washing, and/or solution chemistry), energy (for melting, refining, operating machinery), or fossil fuels as raw materials (most plastics and many solvents). By the time you've made the steel, gold, polymer resins, photoresists, glass, other metals, paint, etc. that goes into a PC, you've used a crapload of materials, the vast bulk of which were just used temporarily in processing. This is not in any way a blanket condemnation of PC manufacture - this is the nature of nearly all manufacturing. Modern industry is constantly seeking to minimize resource use because it saves money to do so.
I wonder how much water it takes to manufacture a bathtub?
But really, this isn't "just scare tactics" as some have suggested. While true, all water is eventually recycled into the hydrosphere, the problems are vast ones of transient supply. Most water comes from rivers, and many of those in the developed world are already essentially dry by the time they reach the ocean, particularly near large population concentrations. Have you seen the Los Angeles river recently? The LA river and the colorado are both dry at the delta now. If LA grows to 14 million from 9, and San Diego and Vegas grow as well, there *will* be a very severe shortage problem without a major investment in new infrastructure for desalination, long distance piping, or conservation. My water pressure in Altadena (a northern LA suburb) is quite pitiful year-round, because they just can't keep a very tall head in the reservoir.
Sure, there's a practically infinite amount of water on the planet, but you can't make the rivers flow faster to produce more fresh water PER YEAR. Another large fraction of fresh water comes from aquifers, which do refill but in general much more slowly than they are being drained. If those empty, consumption has to drop significantly or another source must be found. The danger is having that happen in multiple places at once when the infrastructure isn't ready.
Aside from those, water has to be refined either from seawater via desalinization or sewage. Both of these systems require an awful lot of energy and infrastructure, and can carry their own risks or environmental costs. Desalinization is even more expensive in terms of energy if you live inland, because you have to burn energy to pump the water uphill. So much, in fact, that nobody really does this on a large scale yet - water supplies aren't yet short enough to justify that cost.
From a reasonable viewpoint, it's not scare tactics, it simply makes sense to be aware of how things work.
It is of course a totally reasonable point that the ongoing energy cost of operating four old computers on a continuous basis might outweigh the manufacturing costs of a single modern computer needed to replace them. You have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. If your task is processor limited, it may make sense to replace the machine. If not, though, as with a box I run in my basement just to provide a separate backup location, it makes far more sense to upgrade an 8 year old machine with a bigger hard drive than to manufacture/buy a whole new one. It only needs to transfer 5-30 MB of data per night in incremental backups, and spends most of the time asleep.
In both cases, the correct decision makes environmental
I mean all of this is supposed have happened prior to eps 4-6 so why does nearly everything seem to look more advanced? Bogus...
... make the movies about the prosperous Old Republic era after you finish the first ones. Very smart.
Actually I disagree with you, and I think this is one of the few things they did *well*. Lucas and others explained the idea behind the visuals:
Eps 1-2 occur at the height of a prosperous democratic republic. Lots of wealthy and decadent people around, so a lot of things are made to be much prettier and more stylish than is absolutely necessary for function: the Naboo spacecraft and weapons are the iMacs and iPods of their day. When you've got a happy, wealthy society, people spend effort on making stuff look pretty. (They also explain that Naboo has been peaceful and pastoral for so long that their weapons are primarily ceremonial and thus not very functional.)
The time period of Episodes 4-6 is after the galaxy's been controlled by a tyrannical totalitarian empire for an entire generation. Economic growth is stagnant, scientific growth is sliding backwards, very few people have disposable income, and the whole imperial ethos is utilitarian function over form. Most everything looks cold and practical rather than stylish and fun. It's the USSR in the late 1980's, or perhaps Afghanistan under the Taliban, rather than the U.S. in the early 21st century.
Economic and government differences lead to major differences in industrial design and style. We see it on Earth every day. It's also, of course, a very convenient way to leverage improvements in moviemaking technology and technique
I more than recognize the problems everyone points out with the movies, but the visual design is one of the things I think they've done extremely well. They handled a multiple decade gap much better than, say, Star Trek TOS as compared to Enterprise. (Though granted a 35 year gap is a lot harder to work with).
Your problem is that from living in the western world for the last three decades, you assume progress always goes upward. History teaches otherwise. Compare Southern Europe during the peak of the Roman empire (~200 C.E.) to the same location during the dark ages (~700 C.E.). Or the Arab/Islamic world at the height of its' development to the fundamentalist regimes that have stifled it since then. Or China at the height of development before it isolated itself for the better part of a milennium and fell behind the rest of the world.
We're in a period of growth and development now. It may not be forever, who knows. Lucas' universe is really quite an accurate reflection (well, analogy) of historical reality.
P.S. Before the mac people jump on me for implying that Apple stuff is unnecessarily fancy, I'll point out that I think fashion/style is a *good* thing for a wealthy society to spend money/effort on, and I am in fact a devoted mac user verging on evangelist. Moreover, I think the money spent on macs is actually well returned in the features, functionality, and reliability of the hardware, the style is just the incidental result of a good industrial design team.
Slightly changing the low bit of ...
How does one slightly change a bit?
I've been fascinated with Maglev technology since I was a kid, though I admit I haven't followed it closely lately - I didn't know a functioning passenger transrapid had been built in China.
Anyway, I have long been extremely annoyed that Transrapid's maglev technology has been the one to catch on the fastest, because as I see it, it has some major drawbacks relative to other maglev designs.
The primary problem is that the transrapid system uses magnetic levitation in attraction mode -- meaning you're not floating mutually repelling magnets, you're wrapping a part of the train under the track and using magnetic attraction to pull it upward.
There are some huge basic problems with this strategy. To start with, magnetic attraction is dynamically unstable - the closer you get, the harder it pulls, until you stick to the track. Transrapid deals with this by detecting the gap and constantly adjusting the current to the electromagnets with a fast computer. Magnetic repulsion, on the other hand, is dynamically stable: float a magnet over the other one and it will simply sit there, so fast computer needed. The Japanese design functions this way: the train sits in a U-shaped track, repelled on three sides.
There are some other serious advantages of repulsion-mode maglev:
The major downside of the repulsion design is that it requires superconducting electromagnets on the train, and they're very expensive (for now) and can cause interference problems if not properly shielded, as someone noted above. But I see that as a technological problem that will be solved eventually and it would be better to work on that now than to saddle ourselves with a standard that has the fundamental problems of attraction-mode maglev design. Sixty years down the road when superconducting magnets are cheap, we might really regret that.
There's another minor downside to repulsion maglev as well- it only levitates when the train is going fast enough to induce currents in the track, so the train has to settle onto wheels as it rolls into the station. (or have supplementary electromagnets in the station).
Both the Japanese and transrapid designs have one other problem: the tracks have to pre-define the angle of the train as it rounds corners (the japanese track is a square "u"). You determine the speed beforehand and angle the track so that the force vector on the passengers is "down" with respect to their butts. This means you can't change the speed of the train later without making it ride like a roller coaster, so no faster trains down the line, and no adjusting speed for current conditions. And it means you have to manufacture very carefully-designed track segments at precise and constantly-changing curvatures. You either have standard track segments and limit the curves you can build, or build a lot of custom track segments. This gets expensive.
IIRC, there was a design done by a team in the US two decades or so ago that used a curved U-shaped track in repulsion mode that had the benefits of the japanese de
Photoshop and Imageready, fine, you need Windows for that.
You do? Crap, that means I need to take a look under the hood of this predatory feline I've been driving and exorcise the win.dll that must be at its core. And here I thought this thing was keeping me safe from evil.
It's extremely hard to protect against these EMP weapons. f you have a single wire hanging outside your faraday cage/shielding, you can fry the circuitry inside. You'd need to carefully put everything in thick metal boxes with fully internal power supplies/batteries/generators and make sure all interconnects everywhere are 100% optical.
You liberal types need to understand, *getting people to like you is not the proper goal of a nation-state*. Getting people to behave is.
... And you propose to do this how? With violence? Yeah, that works. Ask Israel.
Getting people to behave
Ten thousand years of history have shown over and over again that ratcheting up the violence in most cases leads to more and more violence. Ask the Isralis how well bombing houses has induced "good behavior" among the Palestinian insurgets, for one of several dozen recent examples. There are of course hateful idiots on both sides and so there will always be some violence until the religious hatred is somehow eliminated.
But every time both sides *refrain* from responding with violence, the attack rates go down. Every time one side responds with increased violence, the attack rates go up.
Ten thousand years of religion, philosophy, and folk wisdom have given us a lot of sayings like "turn the other cheek", "the stronger man walks away", and "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Ten thousand year of experience shows that trying to get people to "behave" by scaring them into it with violence never works for very long.
What you anti-liberal types need to realize is that ten thousand years of wisdom isn't total bullshit that can be happily ignored every time you're angry and your instinctive circuits, the lizard brain we all have, wants revenge. Being human has something to do with rising above our animal nature. Hawks somehow manage to turn ignoring wisdom into a virtue by going into masculine posturing mode and appealing to the other lizard brains around them.
I'm not some hippie peacenik who thinks all wars and all violence can be avoided. Certainly situations arise where a nation has no choice but to defend itself or risk extinction. WWII was a 20th-century example. Gulf War I was also, as far Kuwait was concerned. But diplomacy, guile, trade, interdependence, and nonviolent action have ended more threats and removed more dictators than wars have by an order of magnitude.
These things described here will actually be very useful weapons because they can disrupt organized warfare with very few deaths. No, they aren't very useful against guerrillas or terrorists. But in some other circumstances, they *do* give an option that kills fewer people while accomplishing many of the same goals.
'What if' we killed no Iraqis in Bush's war? Instead of 50,000 insurgents, how many hundreds of thousands of guerrilla fighters would we be facing now?
Well, given that estimates are that we killed somewhere in the range of 10,000 iraqi troops in the war, if your so-called 'logic' held up, we'd be facing 60,000 instead of 50,000. That's hardly make-or break. But of course the logic doesn't hold because violence begets resistance. If the US were invaded, regardless of reason, a whole lot of guys would be headed for the hills with guns. Why is it so hard to understand that Iraqis might react the same way?
But anyway, even with these EMP weapons, the only way to kill ZERO Iraqis is to not invade, because you can't occupy ground with EMPs. So to have zero casualties, we don't ivade. And if we hadn't invaded, we'd be facing ZERO insurgents...
So in the winners bracket, can Sigourney rescue California?
You can't have it print it out and just drop it automatically into a bucket ... otherwise hacked software can just change the printout as well as the electronic vote.
You have to print it out and have the machine hand it TO THE VOTER. Then the voter can verify that it's what she intended and drop the ballot into the backup ballot box.
Ev
There is one way to guarantee that this gets picked up by the mainstream media.
Some white hat who reads slashdot and who has Access on her computer needs to give five thousand votes to Cowboy Neal in the CA recall election two weeks from now. Not enough to actually screw up the election, but enough to prove to everyone that the system is insecure.
If that doesn't happen, then we're all stuck with the more subtle, believable vote hacks that unscrupulous people WILL be implementing.
So not only is my Mac immune to Windows viruses; it also helps those viruses destroy Windows machines?
That's the best argument I've ever heard for picking Mac over Linux.
5 1/4" floppies. Double-sided, and definitely better than audio cassette.
Shortly afterwards, a memo:
FROM: Microsoft Spokesdroid
TO: Bill Gates
SUBJECT: New features
Majesty,
They're on to us, but I think I bought some time. Tell the Longhorn guys to come up with 4-5 new features before the Developers Conf. and we're golden.
Suggestion: no paper clips with eyeballs this time. Maybe we can try automatically linking keywords to our sales partners' websites again, I think they've forgotten that one. Worth a try.
Regards,
'droid
So what would a Bong 777 be made out of?
-Ev
Having, in fact, read the code myself, and worked with it for three straight years, I can tell you that you are dead wrong.
These little programs do things we never, ever expected. And some things we don't even know how to control. They cheat! They take advantage of every element of the system that's possible in ways we sometimes don't even understand.
And they write their own code in ways no human ever could. I've had experiences where it takes upwards of an hour to understand a 20-instruction-long digital organism because the code is so twisted. Stuff no programmer could ever have written, not even the obfuscated code gurus.
Like any evolving organism, they'll do whatever it takes to get ahead.
Yeah, I'd been lazy about getting the new stuff on the site. The new site was 95% done in a different directory this morning when I saw the posting.
Check back now.
For the record, I'm one of Dr. Adami's grad students in (The Digital Life Lab) at Caltech. Most of the programming is done at our sister lab in Michigan.
We recently released Avida version 2.0, with a new GUI and complete with god mode where you can inspect and edit the genome of any organism at any point.
We encourage you to play with Avida yourself. You can get information and a Mac OS X binary at:
Avida's Hompeage. Older versions for linux and windows are available there as well.
The intrepid can build the current version for OS X or Linux from source, please see Avida's Sourceforge Project. If you want the nice GUI, you'll need QT.
Other information about Avida, our lab's research, and artificial life in general can be found at:
The Digital Life Lab Homepage
Our sister lab at MSU, run by Professors Charles Ofria and Richard Lenski.
The Int'l Society For Artificial Life
This has got to be total horseshit.
Two very simple reasons.
1) Apple sets an MAP for all of their products. Resellers are not allowed to undercut that MAP; i.e. nobody can sell you a new mac for cheaper than list. It is my understanding that trying it can lose a reseller their license to sell Apple products.
2) The example prices they list aren't just under MAP, they're under wholesale. Said hypothetical reseller that "purchaseprogram.com" is buying from in bulk would be losing money on each unit.