I seem to recall reading about "zero-point energy" after watching "The Incredibles" on DVD with commentary and finding out that there actually is such a thing. Isn't this it?
Talking on a phone is an added distraction. Its that simple.
I don't get why talking on a hands-free cell phone is so bad, but having a conversation with someone in the passenger seat (which people have been doing since cars had two seats) is still okay.
I think ST is a very interesting and peculiar theory. I'm not sure it's a disaster. Even if ST is proved wrong in some way the math that resulted from ST is still worthwhile.
Think of Newtonian physics. We now know that Newton falls apart when viewed under the lens of Einsteinian relativity. But if you're dealing with relatively small masses, at relatively slow speeds, then Newton's physics works perfectly because relativity is too small a factor to affect the numbers. Likewise with quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level.
Neither of those three "theories" is a complete and accurate view of how the universe works. They are each of them a model for certain situations, and which one you choose depends on which one is most appropriate.
The thing about string "theory" is that it's more of a model than a theory. When physics gets down to this level, it's more mathematics than science. The theory/model that you use is never going to be perfect or complete, but as long as it fits the purposes you want it for, it's good.
the eternal conflict between wanting to be a lazy bum and wanting to work hard
I like to point out that every lasting invention Man has ever come up with has had one goal on common: to help him be lazy. Airplanes? We want to get somewhere faster with fewer bumps. Computers? We hate doing math by hand. The wheel? Dragging things on a sledge is so last ice age. Sliced bread? Who has time to slice by hand?
It's strangely appropriate that Man is willing to put in more creative work now in order to do less work tomorrow and every day thereafter.
What would the consequences of such a device be if we could replicate anything at no cost?
You're assuming we have limitless access to energy to power the thing, right?
Personally, I foresee a rampant culture of hedonists and drug addicts. There are plenty of people who, given the ability to replicate anything on a desk at no cost, will ask for heroin or coke or porn without even thinking twice.
Most of the rest will ask for bars of solid gold, because they're not smart enough to realize twelve million other people have already done the same thing.
On the other hand... If they portrayed using a Razor or an HTC Universal as a car phone interacting wirelessly with the vehicle through Bluetooth - would you have believed them? Corded car phones were believable.
Oh, don't think so hard about it. Evangelions are far less believable than cordless portable phones; they used cordless communicators in "Star Trek" back in the '60s.
Fact is, they simply didn't imagine such a thing would be commonplace by 2015. Or else they didn't put any thought toward the question at all. Which is fine, I'm not blaming them; it's just funny in hindsight that the major leaps in technology haven't or won't happen by the year the movie is set, while the minor leaps were all overlooked.
Back then, when I pressed "record" on a tape recorder or the shutter button on a camera, it did what I wanted instantaneously. None of this goddamn 2-second delay, or booting into the OS for 30 seconds to figure out how to record from the microphone.
The 2-second delay is normally a little thing called "autofocus". It's actually optional.
Not sure why you're rebooting your computer just to copy an audio CD, though.
...is the anachronisms you get in "near future" movies and TV shows of the recent past. I still smirk whenever I remember RoboCop walking through a room of reel-to-reel data storage machines before plugging himself into a crime database, or Misato calling NERV headquarters on a bulky corded car phone.
The thing about near-future cinema is they always spend more time thinking about the big technology changes than the little ones.
A better quote from the article:
on
Sims the New Dolls?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Among psychologists and education experts, it is widely accepted that playing with dolls is a safe and perhaps even essential part of self-discovery and growing up for many children, especially girls. Now, some of those experts are catching on to how quickly video games are moving into the territory formerly dominated by a slim blonde named Barbie.
Anyone who has preschool-age children and a few baby dolls in the house will notice that, eventually, the kids (both boys and girls) will pick up the dolls and start role-playing out the very same relationship they perceive between their parent(s) and themselves. If you rock them and tell them stories, they'll rock their dolls and tell them stories. If you yell at them and put them in time out, their dolls will experience similar punishments. And psychologists have long used doll play to determine whether small children have been sexually molested by family members by watching to see if they do the same thing, without any encouragement, to the dolls.
As kids get older, though, their doll play moves on from simply reenacting life and becomes more imaginative. The dolls will begin to live out the kind of fantasy life the child thinks s/he will have as an adult, or wishes s/he will have. They'll give the dolls the kind of lives they learned about in books or tv shows or movies.
You have to be a bit older still to realize that dolls and/or Sims can be treated in ways you'd never treat real people, but it's still reenactment, even if you're just reenacting "Silence of the Lambs" torture cells or action movies where the villain catches on fire and falls off the roof. Anyone who reaches that point has generally concluded that Barbie is just plastic, Sims are just software code, and there's nothing anthropomorphic about them in his/her mind anymore.
Sims are noteworthy, though, because they react in ways Barbie won't and will actually teach some social behaviors, like babies who aren't cared for will be taken away from you. In the past, this sort of educational value was limited to "If I torture my Barbies, my friends won't play with me anymore" or "If I rip Barbie's arm off, it doesn't go back on." Not that those aren't valuable lessons, mind you, they're just much more limited.
Sims should never be used as a replacement for real socialization, of course, and if a child is losing friends in favor of Sims that's videogame addiction and a problem to be a addressed. (If the child never had friends to begin with, I reserve judgment.) But as "the new Barbie", I don't think there's any problems to be found.
I confess I've never played the game much myself, but I do remember with a smile comments on the impressive physics engine Bungie developed for their "Myth" series of games.
One early player posted on a discussion forum that he wanted to incinerate a dwarf with the biggest explosion he could make just by surrounding it with grenades, and the resulting explosion dropped the dwarf's weapon back down out of the stratosphere several long seconds later. He did the math and calculated that the weapon was blasted straight up a couple of miles before coming back down.
Granted, that's not very realistic, but he was very impressed that the physics engine was willing and able to track a piece of debris for that long.
Physics engines are an essential component of any 3D game, and the more consistent they are with the real world the more believable the game is. You can throw everything else out the development window, I think, as long as objects bounce correctly under 9.8 meters per second per second of gravitational acceleration.
Scarlet Witch registers, ok cool. So the government now has her on file as a human (or humanoid really for the non human types as well) WMD. That's great. What the fuck does that do to stop a character, like old Scarlet, from going apeshit and destroying the entire fucking universe?
She already did that in last year's "House of M" crossover, and at the end of it she depowered herself and relocated to Europe.
The underlying question you ask, of course, is the same one you might ask of the US or Russia regarding their nuclear missiles. Who stops people with overwhelming destructive power from destroying the world with it? The answer is: everyone else who has the same power.
Comics in general and Marvel in particular have had a long tradition in embracing social issues - witness the classic Marvel comic series that decried on McCarthyism. This one is interesting because they aren't really taking sides.
Let's not delude ourselves here. "Civil War" is just another excuse for Marvel to have half its comic heroes beating up the other half in classic tried-and-true summer crossover fashion.
Yesterday, Marvel Comics released the first in its miniseries Civil War, which can only be described as a gutsy comic-book series focusing on the whole debate over homeland security and tighter government controls in the name of public safety.
The "whole debate" is over a new version of the Mutant Registration Act, which has been a mainstay of X-Men plotlines since the late 1970s. The first "X-Men" movie revolved around it. The only difference this time is that the rest of the Marvel Universe is getting in on the debate, and they only reason they're doing that is because comic books don't sell well enough for Marvel to segregate their mega-crossovers into X-Men, Avengers, and Spider-Man universes anymore.
I think it'll be a story to watch, but let's not have any misconceptions that this is something radical and different for them.
If DRM becomes as oppressive as the big media players seem to want it to be, then it will drive people away from platforms requiring it and towards platforms that circumvent it.
Er? Why wouldn't those people just use different software on the same platform... or even different media formats on the same software?
Saying Windows users will migrate to Linux just to avoid DRM is like saying the Pilgrims migrated to the New World because the food was bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Each image of the original page is supplied with a translation so one can make sense of it.
Brilliant! Maybe they'll inspire the American IRS to do the same thing with the tax codes.
1. Dream up a far-fetched 'theory' that Joe public can understand and involves strong emotions ....
2. Seek publicity
3.
4. Profit!
I think #3 involves selling the theory in a best-selling nonfiction book to Christian creationists.
If Netflix is on top of their game, they had better move quickly and setup deals with the studios to offer movies for download
Netflix works great for everyone who doesn't already have broadband, or who prefer watching movies on a real television.
Nothing short of an Internet2 pipe can match the bandwidth of a truck full of cassette tapes... or a mailbag full of DVDs.
I seem to recall reading about "zero-point energy" after watching "The Incredibles" on DVD with commentary and finding out that there actually is such a thing. Isn't this it?
Talking on a phone is an added distraction. Its that simple.
I don't get why talking on a hands-free cell phone is so bad, but having a conversation with someone in the passenger seat (which people have been doing since cars had two seats) is still okay.
I'm NOT advocating this, but I'm curious: just what does it take to get people to revolt?
Take away our bread and circuses.
I think ST is a very interesting and peculiar theory. I'm not sure it's a disaster. Even if ST is proved wrong in some way the math that resulted from ST is still worthwhile.
Think of Newtonian physics. We now know that Newton falls apart when viewed under the lens of Einsteinian relativity. But if you're dealing with relatively small masses, at relatively slow speeds, then Newton's physics works perfectly because relativity is too small a factor to affect the numbers. Likewise with quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level.
Neither of those three "theories" is a complete and accurate view of how the universe works. They are each of them a model for certain situations, and which one you choose depends on which one is most appropriate.
The thing about string "theory" is that it's more of a model than a theory. When physics gets down to this level, it's more mathematics than science. The theory/model that you use is never going to be perfect or complete, but as long as it fits the purposes you want it for, it's good.
A 19-year old should have known better.
You haven't known many 19-year-olds, have you?
Has there ever been a technology some inventive human has not adapted for self-gratification?
Bread knives.
First of all, "AppleBerry" sounds dumb, I would have gone with "MacBerry."
Either one is better than "Blackle", though.
Amir, if you want to refund my money you know where to contact me, and this page will disappear forever.
That's from the bottom of the web page. Sounds like extortion to me, no matter what else you might think about the validity of his motivation.
the eternal conflict between wanting to be a lazy bum and wanting to work hard
I like to point out that every lasting invention Man has ever come up with has had one goal on common: to help him be lazy. Airplanes? We want to get somewhere faster with fewer bumps. Computers? We hate doing math by hand. The wheel? Dragging things on a sledge is so last ice age. Sliced bread? Who has time to slice by hand?
It's strangely appropriate that Man is willing to put in more creative work now in order to do less work tomorrow and every day thereafter.
It all comes down to the AdWords algorithm and its intent, which isn't to help Luis OR Amazon, but to simply maximize profit for Google.
Darn those publicly traded companies! How dare they!
"Do No Evil" only really applies when you don't count making a profit as "Evil", folks.
What would the consequences of such a device be if we could replicate anything at no cost?
You're assuming we have limitless access to energy to power the thing, right?
Personally, I foresee a rampant culture of hedonists and drug addicts. There are plenty of people who, given the ability to replicate anything on a desk at no cost, will ask for heroin or coke or porn without even thinking twice.
Most of the rest will ask for bars of solid gold, because they're not smart enough to realize twelve million other people have already done the same thing.
On the other hand... If they portrayed using a Razor or an HTC Universal as a car phone interacting wirelessly with the vehicle through Bluetooth - would you have believed them? Corded car phones were believable.
Oh, don't think so hard about it. Evangelions are far less believable than cordless portable phones; they used cordless communicators in "Star Trek" back in the '60s.
Fact is, they simply didn't imagine such a thing would be commonplace by 2015. Or else they didn't put any thought toward the question at all. Which is fine, I'm not blaming them; it's just funny in hindsight that the major leaps in technology haven't or won't happen by the year the movie is set, while the minor leaps were all overlooked.
Back then, when I pressed "record" on a tape recorder or the shutter button on a camera, it did what I wanted instantaneously. None of this goddamn 2-second delay, or booting into the OS for 30 seconds to figure out how to record from the microphone.
The 2-second delay is normally a little thing called "autofocus". It's actually optional.
Not sure why you're rebooting your computer just to copy an audio CD, though.
...is the anachronisms you get in "near future" movies and TV shows of the recent past. I still smirk whenever I remember RoboCop walking through a room of reel-to-reel data storage machines before plugging himself into a crime database, or Misato calling NERV headquarters on a bulky corded car phone.
The thing about near-future cinema is they always spend more time thinking about the big technology changes than the little ones.
As kids get older, though, their doll play moves on from simply reenacting life and becomes more imaginative. The dolls will begin to live out the kind of fantasy life the child thinks s/he will have as an adult, or wishes s/he will have. They'll give the dolls the kind of lives they learned about in books or tv shows or movies.
You have to be a bit older still to realize that dolls and/or Sims can be treated in ways you'd never treat real people, but it's still reenactment, even if you're just reenacting "Silence of the Lambs" torture cells or action movies where the villain catches on fire and falls off the roof. Anyone who reaches that point has generally concluded that Barbie is just plastic, Sims are just software code, and there's nothing anthropomorphic about them in his/her mind anymore.
Sims are noteworthy, though, because they react in ways Barbie won't and will actually teach some social behaviors, like babies who aren't cared for will be taken away from you. In the past, this sort of educational value was limited to "If I torture my Barbies, my friends won't play with me anymore" or "If I rip Barbie's arm off, it doesn't go back on." Not that those aren't valuable lessons, mind you, they're just much more limited.
Sims should never be used as a replacement for real socialization, of course, and if a child is losing friends in favor of Sims that's videogame addiction and a problem to be a addressed. (If the child never had friends to begin with, I reserve judgment.) But as "the new Barbie", I don't think there's any problems to be found.
Subjecting one's offspring to unspeakable torture is every American's GOD GIVEN RIGHT.
For those of us who know offspring who have been subjected to same, this isn't very funny. Shame on you.
I confess I've never played the game much myself, but I do remember with a smile comments on the impressive physics engine Bungie developed for their "Myth" series of games.
One early player posted on a discussion forum that he wanted to incinerate a dwarf with the biggest explosion he could make just by surrounding it with grenades, and the resulting explosion dropped the dwarf's weapon back down out of the stratosphere several long seconds later. He did the math and calculated that the weapon was blasted straight up a couple of miles before coming back down.
Granted, that's not very realistic, but he was very impressed that the physics engine was willing and able to track a piece of debris for that long.
Physics engines are an essential component of any 3D game, and the more consistent they are with the real world the more believable the game is. You can throw everything else out the development window, I think, as long as objects bounce correctly under 9.8 meters per second per second of gravitational acceleration.
Scarlet Witch registers, ok cool. So the government now has her on file as a human (or humanoid really for the non human types as well) WMD. That's great. What the fuck does that do to stop a character, like old Scarlet, from going apeshit and destroying the entire fucking universe?
She already did that in last year's "House of M" crossover, and at the end of it she depowered herself and relocated to Europe.
The underlying question you ask, of course, is the same one you might ask of the US or Russia regarding their nuclear missiles. Who stops people with overwhelming destructive power from destroying the world with it? The answer is: everyone else who has the same power.
Comics in general and Marvel in particular have had a long tradition in embracing social issues - witness the classic Marvel comic series that decried on McCarthyism. This one is interesting because they aren't really taking sides.
Let's not delude ourselves here. "Civil War" is just another excuse for Marvel to have half its comic heroes beating up the other half in classic tried-and-true summer crossover fashion.
Yesterday, Marvel Comics released the first in its miniseries Civil War, which can only be described as a gutsy comic-book series focusing on the whole debate over homeland security and tighter government controls in the name of public safety.
The "whole debate" is over a new version of the Mutant Registration Act, which has been a mainstay of X-Men plotlines since the late 1970s. The first "X-Men" movie revolved around it. The only difference this time is that the rest of the Marvel Universe is getting in on the debate, and they only reason they're doing that is because comic books don't sell well enough for Marvel to segregate their mega-crossovers into X-Men, Avengers, and Spider-Man universes anymore.
I think it'll be a story to watch, but let's not have any misconceptions that this is something radical and different for them.
does Apple have a Windows lab?
How else do you think they got BootCamp up and running?
...Now, is there any chance I can legally buy a used driver's license?
If DRM becomes as oppressive as the big media players seem to want it to be, then it will drive people away from platforms requiring it and towards platforms that circumvent it.
Er? Why wouldn't those people just use different software on the same platform... or even different media formats on the same software?
Saying Windows users will migrate to Linux just to avoid DRM is like saying the Pilgrims migrated to the New World because the food was bad.