I utterly disagree that attacks on the rest of us are mere collateral damage -- regardless of whether there is internal conflict, it can't be denied that the extremist element is openly and intentionally at war with -- well, literally everyone else. If the moderates simply rolled over tomorrow and surrendered, and the internal conflict you describe was instantly resolved, we'd still be unbelievers in the "Land of War" and considered fair game.
Nevertheless, I appreciate that you took the time to explain further. Your explanation raises a complex facet that I have rarely and inadequately considered.
In the chaos of a world caught in the destruction of Islamic Reformation, it's best if your country can, at a moment's notice, shut down borders, imports, and exports for an undefined period of time.
NO country in the WTO today can do this. International markets are like a drug- and once addicted, you can never leave.
Islamic Reformation?
LOL
It's depressing because I agree with the rest of your statement wholeheartedly.
Who said I didn't get value for the money? I read a lot. I do things outside. I also watch TV. Doing one thing doesn't mean I don't do the others. In fact, a device like the Tivo makes it easier to do the other things you describe. It actually makes more sense to pay for it if I also wish to do those other things.
IMO this is a canard. Can you reconstruct a dinosaur from its bones? No. The preservation of information seems to be a half-cocked idea.
Your examples aren't especially relevant or accurate. You can't reconstruct a dinosaur from it's bones because the bones are only a small fraction of the information you'd need. It's a theoretical concept, not one with large-scale practical applicability like you describe. In theory you COULD reconstruct a dinosaur, but you'd need "perfect information" -- all the details of EVERYTHING that is remotely related to the dinosaur for the point in time at which you wished to reconstruct it. That information isn't lost in the universal sense, though it isn't available to you or me, and we clearly lack the know-how to recover it.
Consider a less esoteric example: computer forensics. If I blasted a hard drive with a powerful electromagnet, I wouldn't know where to start to reconstruct that information. From my point of view, it seems ridiculous to assume that the information wasn't lost. But as you well know, it's recoverable. Assuming the contents of the drive were believed to be sufficiently important to warrant the effort, the FBI could probably recover the original contents. The information wasn't lost, it was just altered or scrambled.
The parallels aren't exact, but from the point of view of a physicist, the information is still out there, we just lack the "forensic know-how" to reconstruct it.
Furthermore, from this, we can draw the obvious conclusion: black holes are actually hide-outs for hacker terrorists wanted by the FBI.
I think they'll get useful results, I just think there will be a huge amount of overlap with everything the submarine guys already know. It's an obvious-enough connection that I have to assume they've pursued it. On the other hand, the longest submarine mission on record is "only" 300 days (HMS Turbulent prior to and during the start of the war in Iraq), and of course they're substantially larger and there are many more people aboard, so the Mars-sim folks will have a lot more time to go completely batshit crazy.:)
You and I clearly have wildly different definitions for "interesting"... but your comments further strengthen my belief that the submarine-using navies of the world have probably solved many of these problems decades ago... certainly the situation isn't precisely the same, but there are many similarities.
What amazes me is that they can successfully pitch this as a professional-quality product despite the fact that the quality of the video and audio is so bad it's almost unwatchable. It's a weird time in video -- on one hand everyone is up in arms about hi-def DVDs and HDTV, and on the other hand people are running around watching over-compressed clips on a 2" low-res cellphone screen.
When I called them, they disabled the card (the card already in my Tivo continued to work) and turned off billing for the DVR -- I ignored it for the first month, until I realized they were charging me for the damned thing. That would lead me to believe it's probably not associated with my account any more.
It isn't HD, I was waiting for Comcast to wake up and start letting people use Tivos, at which point I'll ditch satellite. It's about time I gave the cable people a chance to piss me off again, LOL.
People balk at having to give their SSN's to the cable company to get service, but it's information they want so they can send you to a collection collections if you don't pay or run off with digital boxes (those thing can run $300-$500 [i]apiece[/i] depending on the model's capabilities.
I've been wondering how much a DirecTV's DVR hardware is worth (in theory, not if I actually tried to sell it). I stopped the DTV installers from stealing my dual-tuner Tivo, but they left the DTV DVR here anyway. DTV was supposed to send a prepaid sticker so I could return it, but that was eight or nine months ago. The damned thing is brand new, in the box. At the one year mark, I'm liberating the hard drive and taking the rest out in the woods to shoot it.
Vernor Vinge has written some very enjoyable books.
Accelerando was unreadably awful.
Yes, I made up the word "unreadably" specifically for Accelerando.
I read about 40 or 50 books a year, and perhaps a quarter of them are sci-fi. Accelerando has the honor of being the only book I've bought in recent memory that was so awful that I couldn't bring myself to finish it.
Because all the same dorks who grew up watching that garbage now piss away their meager spare non-burger-flipping hours online, role-playing Suxzar the Elf Mage, or what have you. (FTW)
I suppose I could have been more specific, but it was wandering away from the topic. The chairs hold either two or three, and there isn't much room. To get them to fit you have no real choice but to buy the chair-specific ones from medical supply shops. I've certainly found other batteries of the correct voltage and amperage but nothing that was about the same dimensions.
In my case looking for them was really just an exercise in curiosity, though -- for my purposes (RC mower) the whole thing will be gas-powered and run off an alternator. The large drive motors will run the wheels, and the smaller motors will raise and lower the mowing decks.
lighter and slimmer version would be a superior solution to using an electric wheelchair
A lighter and slimmer version of this is pure fantasy.
I happen to have two electric wheelchairs in my garage (slated to become an enormous, unnecessarily complex remote control lawnmower), one of which is quite old, and one of which is fairly new (about two years old).
Electric wheelchairs are very simple compared to this device, yet they weigh in at about 300 to 400 pounds. At 150kg (about 330 pounds) this would appear to weigh roughly the same as an electric wheelchair, which is already a pretty amazing accomplishment, although I would assume all those cables are at least supplying power (e.g. no battery weight) and I strongly doubt it has the sturdiness of even a basic electric wheelchair. Everything is heavy on a chair -- batteries, motor, frame, even the electronics (and they usually have a lot, they're often very adjustable via motors and knobs and controls and other shit).
The batteries are huge and heavy because they have to last a very long time. Somebody who needs an electric wheelchair usually isn't going to be very happy about being suddenly stranded without power. In fact, I'm amazed at how stout the batteries are. After a friend delivered these two chairs to me -- telling me that one had been sitting in a barn for three years -- I lugged them to a corner of the garage and forgot about them for awhile. One of the chairs was turned on. It sat there running off batteries for two months before I noticed it was on. And it still had more than enough juice to move around, tilt the seat area, and so on. The only real downer is that they take oddball 24V batteries that apparently only come from medical supply stores ($$$).
Of course, all of that is nothing compared to the other comments pointing out that the seating position makes it a tad bit impractical for human-scale buildings (staircases, doorways)...
Re:Not even close to the tagline, with good reason
on
Robotic Ecologies
·
· Score: 1
Well said. The expense of automation includes more than just the hardware required to do it. There would be massive liability expenses the manufacturers and builders would have to consider, maintenance would be very expensive, and any IT person can tell you the software for successfully and reliably executing these Amazing Feats of Wonder would be tremendously expensive and complex.
I just finished a rather elaborate and carefully designed house, and just getting basic wiring run properly was a nightmare. Even the basic home automation capabilities available today are usually extremely expensive and difficult to set up properly, and they're often only "automated" to the point of some basic scheduling.
Call me when somebody figures out what "AI" means and how to make it happen cheaply. Then MAYBE this stuff will be borderline realistic.
Based on the video posted in the article, I'd say they're using CG but the motion is more like what you'd see in hand-drawn animation. The result is a "feel" that is more like regular animation, with little or none of that weird "uncanny valley" stuff. (Although most of the time CG motion is so poor I'd hesitate to even use the term "uncanny valley" -- to me it often lacks even the basic elements of realism.)
Saying it introduced something "into the realm of storytelling" isn't the same as ranking the story itself with Hemmingway. Everything Stephen King has ever written is garbage, but the man clearly operates "in the realm of storytelling."
Back then the technology WAS very expensive, not worth the investment -- as well as limited and very complex.
The movie was pretty much an experiment, first and foremost.
Slashdot Mirror
I utterly disagree that attacks on the rest of us are mere collateral damage -- regardless of whether there is internal conflict, it can't be denied that the extremist element is openly and intentionally at war with -- well, literally everyone else. If the moderates simply rolled over tomorrow and surrendered, and the internal conflict you describe was instantly resolved, we'd still be unbelievers in the "Land of War" and considered fair game.
Nevertheless, I appreciate that you took the time to explain further. Your explanation raises a complex facet that I have rarely and inadequately considered.
Handwriting and penmanship may well become one of the most pathetic losses in modern civilization.
Fixed.
In the chaos of a world caught in the destruction of Islamic Reformation, it's best if your country can, at a moment's notice, shut down borders, imports, and exports for an undefined period of time.
NO country in the WTO today can do this. International markets are like a drug- and once addicted, you can never leave.
Islamic Reformation?
LOL
It's depressing because I agree with the rest of your statement wholeheartedly.
Who said I didn't get value for the money? I read a lot. I do things outside. I also watch TV. Doing one thing doesn't mean I don't do the others. In fact, a device like the Tivo makes it easier to do the other things you describe. It actually makes more sense to pay for it if I also wish to do those other things.
You've given me a whole new reason to never buy a used laptop. *shudder*
I read lots of books -- 20 a year, on average.
I go for walks outside.
Sometimes I also watch TV. Get over it.
IMO this is a canard. Can you reconstruct a dinosaur from its bones? No. The preservation of information seems to be a half-cocked idea.
Your examples aren't especially relevant or accurate. You can't reconstruct a dinosaur from it's bones because the bones are only a small fraction of the information you'd need. It's a theoretical concept, not one with large-scale practical applicability like you describe. In theory you COULD reconstruct a dinosaur, but you'd need "perfect information" -- all the details of EVERYTHING that is remotely related to the dinosaur for the point in time at which you wished to reconstruct it. That information isn't lost in the universal sense, though it isn't available to you or me, and we clearly lack the know-how to recover it.
Consider a less esoteric example: computer forensics. If I blasted a hard drive with a powerful electromagnet, I wouldn't know where to start to reconstruct that information. From my point of view, it seems ridiculous to assume that the information wasn't lost. But as you well know, it's recoverable. Assuming the contents of the drive were believed to be sufficiently important to warrant the effort, the FBI could probably recover the original contents. The information wasn't lost, it was just altered or scrambled.
The parallels aren't exact, but from the point of view of a physicist, the information is still out there, we just lack the "forensic know-how" to reconstruct it.
Furthermore, from this, we can draw the obvious conclusion: black holes are actually hide-outs for hacker terrorists wanted by the FBI.
Agreed, but "two stones with untold terabytes of birds" doesn't quite have the same impact...
I think they'll get useful results, I just think there will be a huge amount of overlap with everything the submarine guys already know. It's an obvious-enough connection that I have to assume they've pursued it. On the other hand, the longest submarine mission on record is "only" 300 days (HMS Turbulent prior to and during the start of the war in Iraq), and of course they're substantially larger and there are many more people aboard, so the Mars-sim folks will have a lot more time to go completely batshit crazy. :)
Because then we'd have to simulate them crashing the vessel into something useful.
You and I clearly have wildly different definitions for "interesting"... but your comments further strengthen my belief that the submarine-using navies of the world have probably solved many of these problems decades ago... certainly the situation isn't precisely the same, but there are many similarities.
Or more accurately, take care of two stones with one bird...
What amazes me is that they can successfully pitch this as a professional-quality product despite the fact that the quality of the video and audio is so bad it's almost unwatchable. It's a weird time in video -- on one hand everyone is up in arms about hi-def DVDs and HDTV, and on the other hand people are running around watching over-compressed clips on a 2" low-res cellphone screen.
Suspension of disbelief.
Although you can figure out a way to dispense disbelief, I can think of a whole bunch of fun ways to cause all sorts of trouble.
Thanks for the info, I'll think about selling it.
When I called them, they disabled the card (the card already in my Tivo continued to work) and turned off billing for the DVR -- I ignored it for the first month, until I realized they were charging me for the damned thing. That would lead me to believe it's probably not associated with my account any more.
It isn't HD, I was waiting for Comcast to wake up and start letting people use Tivos, at which point I'll ditch satellite. It's about time I gave the cable people a chance to piss me off again, LOL.
Thanks again for the info.
People balk at having to give their SSN's to the cable company to get service, but it's information they want so they can send you to a collection collections if you don't pay or run off with digital boxes (those thing can run $300-$500 [i]apiece[/i] depending on the model's capabilities.
I've been wondering how much a DirecTV's DVR hardware is worth (in theory, not if I actually tried to sell it). I stopped the DTV installers from stealing my dual-tuner Tivo, but they left the DTV DVR here anyway. DTV was supposed to send a prepaid sticker so I could return it, but that was eight or nine months ago. The damned thing is brand new, in the box. At the one year mark, I'm liberating the hard drive and taking the rest out in the woods to shoot it.
Vernor Vinge has written some very enjoyable books.
Accelerando was unreadably awful.
Yes, I made up the word "unreadably" specifically for Accelerando.
I read about 40 or 50 books a year, and perhaps a quarter of them are sci-fi. Accelerando has the honor of being the only book I've bought in recent memory that was so awful that I couldn't bring myself to finish it.
Because all the same dorks who grew up watching that garbage now piss away their meager spare non-burger-flipping hours online, role-playing Suxzar the Elf Mage, or what have you. (FTW)
I suppose I could have been more specific, but it was wandering away from the topic. The chairs hold either two or three, and there isn't much room. To get them to fit you have no real choice but to buy the chair-specific ones from medical supply shops. I've certainly found other batteries of the correct voltage and amperage but nothing that was about the same dimensions.
In my case looking for them was really just an exercise in curiosity, though -- for my purposes (RC mower) the whole thing will be gas-powered and run off an alternator. The large drive motors will run the wheels, and the smaller motors will raise and lower the mowing decks.
lighter and slimmer version would be a superior solution to using an electric wheelchair
A lighter and slimmer version of this is pure fantasy.
I happen to have two electric wheelchairs in my garage (slated to become an enormous, unnecessarily complex remote control lawnmower), one of which is quite old, and one of which is fairly new (about two years old).
Electric wheelchairs are very simple compared to this device, yet they weigh in at about 300 to 400 pounds. At 150kg (about 330 pounds) this would appear to weigh roughly the same as an electric wheelchair, which is already a pretty amazing accomplishment, although I would assume all those cables are at least supplying power (e.g. no battery weight) and I strongly doubt it has the sturdiness of even a basic electric wheelchair. Everything is heavy on a chair -- batteries, motor, frame, even the electronics (and they usually have a lot, they're often very adjustable via motors and knobs and controls and other shit).
The batteries are huge and heavy because they have to last a very long time. Somebody who needs an electric wheelchair usually isn't going to be very happy about being suddenly stranded without power. In fact, I'm amazed at how stout the batteries are. After a friend delivered these two chairs to me -- telling me that one had been sitting in a barn for three years -- I lugged them to a corner of the garage and forgot about them for awhile. One of the chairs was turned on. It sat there running off batteries for two months before I noticed it was on. And it still had more than enough juice to move around, tilt the seat area, and so on. The only real downer is that they take oddball 24V batteries that apparently only come from medical supply stores ($$$).
Of course, all of that is nothing compared to the other comments pointing out that the seating position makes it a tad bit impractical for human-scale buildings (staircases, doorways)...
Bah. "Damnation Alley" rules and you know it.
Well said. The expense of automation includes more than just the hardware required to do it. There would be massive liability expenses the manufacturers and builders would have to consider, maintenance would be very expensive, and any IT person can tell you the software for successfully and reliably executing these Amazing Feats of Wonder would be tremendously expensive and complex.
I just finished a rather elaborate and carefully designed house, and just getting basic wiring run properly was a nightmare. Even the basic home automation capabilities available today are usually extremely expensive and difficult to set up properly, and they're often only "automated" to the point of some basic scheduling.
Call me when somebody figures out what "AI" means and how to make it happen cheaply. Then MAYBE this stuff will be borderline realistic.
There was a time when I would have found that funny and interesting.
Then Dawkins got everyone discussing "memes" with a straight face and ruined it.
Based on the video posted in the article, I'd say they're using CG but the motion is more like what you'd see in hand-drawn animation. The result is a "feel" that is more like regular animation, with little or none of that weird "uncanny valley" stuff. (Although most of the time CG motion is so poor I'd hesitate to even use the term "uncanny valley" -- to me it often lacks even the basic elements of realism.)
Saying it introduced something "into the realm of storytelling" isn't the same as ranking the story itself with Hemmingway. Everything Stephen King has ever written is garbage, but the man clearly operates "in the realm of storytelling."
Back then the technology WAS very expensive, not worth the investment -- as well as limited and very complex.
The movie was pretty much an experiment, first and foremost.