In the White Mountains in NH, hikers are discouraged from bringing cell phones because they make you feel safer than you are. The NH state legislature recently passed a law that says you have to pay all expenses if you get lost in the mountains and need a rescue - and that's assuming the weather clears up enough for them to come get you! Otherwise, a cell phone is just a way for them to listen to you freeze to death.
That's not true. Fuel for fires/stoves is in fact quite scarce in many poor regions, so you can't "just boil water" - plus it's generally inefficiently burned biomass. Can we say "pollution"?
When you want to make a phone call, you want to make the phone call 'now', right? But if you want to check your email, the delay inherent in needing to pass through a hot spot to download your latest messages may not be a problem. Also how often are people walking down the street using a laptop? Stationary hot spots go well with the current practice of parking your butt somewhere for a while to do work.
Of course if you want to be searching google all the time, anywhere, at the slightest provocation, you're out of luck...
re:your coding-boast: um, how about CVS? Debugging? project management?
I recently installed a win2k dual boot on my linux machine. the only program I have installed under windows is visual studio. why? because it sucks less than any other option available at this time.
Actually, this is kind of the point of a lot of work at the Media Lab (where this hack was done) - corporations encourage you to hack at their stuff, because they give the Media Lab lots of money and want to get cool product ideas back. That seems to be the basic working relationship.
I thought it was especially cute that Bush claims his administration will be free of "scandals and alibis"... like the story that came out today about his latest (unreported, lied-about) youthful indiscretion (at the ripe old age of 30) - an arrest for drunk driving in 1976. What an ass. What a bastard. I can't believe people are falling for this guy's lines.
I thoroughly disagree. I read Dune when I was 13 years old and thought it rocked. Complexity is good, dammit... 13 years old is old enough to start experiencing it.
>#include the obligatory "credit cards are really, really a stupid way to exchange funds" rant.
What obligatory rant would that be? A "there's a better way which currently exists" or a "there's a better way that could be implemented"? Oh, and it's not really a credit card, but a debit card. Not that that's a huge improvement.
"Windows-based systems"? AFAIK, AOL uses Unix boxen running the quasi-recently open-sourced AOLserver. No windows. They know it sucks.
Reference: http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/community.html "... (America Online successfully handles 2.5 billion requests per day with an almost identical architecture: AOLserver + Sybase + Unix)..."
Dammit! Io is practically one big active volcano. The icy worldlet to which you refer is Europa.
This person is misinformed (or at least mistaken), and nicely illustrates a problem I have with default Score:2. There are a nontrivial number of people with karma boosts who make inane and/or just incorrect posts which start out at score 2. This is annoying.
You wrote: "It is interesting to note that the Shumerian god Marduk is described as crashing into earth at some set date a long time ago (all their gods are anologies to planets...they kept insanely precise and detailed records of all the stars). I wouldn't discredit this theory outright."
Hmmmm. Given that this is a conveniently relevant story for an ancient civilization to have as a piece of central dogma (and that you mispelled "Sumerian"), I'm suspicious. Do you have a reference?
Also check out this Matrix spoof (video): http://www.zdnet.com/computerstew/video/qt/episo des/cs11.mov or http://www.zdnet.com/computerstew/video/g2/episo des/cs11.rm
Yeah, I agree. In fact, I think I've pretty much decided that Sterling is completely full of shit. Everything I've ever read by him was similarly discombobulated and uninteresting.
Too bad he's not actually _doing_ something to bring about his vision of "The Future" instead of just babbling about it.
A/. magazine would be a complete waste of time. The stuff I like about/. is: -keeps me up to date. I check the homepage probably ten times a day. A print version would be much slower. -has interesting comments here and there. These would not be available in a print version -it's searchable. This is a _huge_ plus.
None of these things are options in a print magazine.
What I really really need is a basic terminal that I can carry around. Let's say a 14" LCD flatpanel, plus a pointing device (maybe like the eraser-mouse-plus-buttons on an IBM thinkpad). It should have a port to connect a keyboard, or perhaps it should have a tiny keyboard (or handwriting recognition?) included.
Note that I don't want it to be smart at all. Basically, I want a portable X terminal. That would rock. It would of course need to be wirelessly connected to my desktop machine.
If one of these was currently available, I'd buy it.
As has been mentioned before, there are problems with the gray goo scenario. You said: "We must make sure we stop before our nanomachines can reproduce themselves in anything but highly exotic enviornments." What does that mean? I require a highly exotic environment to reproduce: enormous inputs of raw materials, some way to get rid of waste products, a certain temperature range, etc. etc.; it seems extremely unlikely that nanomachines could reproduce out of control, simply because they'd eventually run out of some limiting reagent. I suppose some things are readily available in large supply, but you can't make much from just seawater or just silicon (two very abundant substances, here on Earth).
Besides, how are all those nanites going to power themselves?
For any number of reasons that don't need to be brought up yet again, I disagree. As far as I can tell, when we die, we end.
But isn't that ok? Why are we so afraid of death? People have a beginning and an end, and should be aware of that. I think that knowledge and acceptance of your own mortality makes you a better person. It makes you more appreciative of the time you have to live. It makes you care more about what is happening in the world, because it affects you, and you've only got so much time. It encourages you to go after your dreams rather than go for traditional "success", because if you only have a limited amount of time, why waste it on something you don't like doing?
I think the idea that the soul goes on is detrimental because it encourages people to dismiss reality in favor of an imagined reward that is cut off from our lives by the sharp division of death. Why live life to the fullest when what you "really" should be doing is preparing for eternal life once you're outta here?
On the other hand, maybe people would relax a bit more if our lifespans were extended to, say, 200 healthy years. Maybe things would slow down and people would think about the consequences of their actions more, and feel less pressure. Maybe not. Hmmm.
>"Why does it seem that evolution has not taken place underground? And does he also intend to "dis" the more or less generally accepted idea that most, nearly all of the energy that supports life comes from the sun?"
Um... where did you get the idea that evolution hasn't taken place underground? All evolution means is that the genetic makeup of the organisms has changed over time, according to natural selection. It doesn't require any sort of "progress"; the reason "higher" animals exist in the surface biosphere is because they represent decent reproductive strategies in that situation. A large multicellular organism is a very poor adaptive strategy in the hot, cramped, resource-poor environment underground.
And there is already plenty of evidence of organisms that do not depend on the sun for their energy input (such as the tube worms etc. mentioned in the article). He isn't "dis"-ing anything. Bacteria have been found that live off of hydrocarbon deposits; their metabolisms are totally unlike ours, but they are nonetheless alive.
The article has a low enough science-cluefulness quotient that I suspect its explanation of where the petroleum deposits come from is as garbled as all that talk about the Big Bang. In a recent issue of Discover (I know, not the most reliable, but bear with me), there was an article on microbes which perhaps are responsible for the creation of ore veins through their metabolic action - perhaps something similar is taking place here. Maybe the microbes feed off whatever it is they feed off of, and as they grow and divide, their waste products form a petroleum deposit?
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it going to be a pain in the butt to have a separate battery in each "wireless" component?
In the White Mountains in NH, hikers are discouraged from bringing cell phones because they make you feel safer than you are. The NH state legislature recently passed a law that says you have to pay all expenses if you get lost in the mountains and need a rescue - and that's assuming the weather clears up enough for them to come get you! Otherwise, a cell phone is just a way for them to listen to you freeze to death.
uhhhh... ethernet is transformer-isolated, no?
Solidworks, Protel, trueSpace, MSVC++.
'nuff said.
This makes no sense at all. What the hell?
That's not true. Fuel for fires/stoves is in fact quite scarce in many poor regions, so you can't "just boil water" - plus it's generally inefficiently burned biomass. Can we say "pollution"?
When you want to make a phone call, you want to make the phone call 'now', right? But if you want to check your email, the delay inherent in needing to pass through a hot spot to download your latest messages may not be a problem. Also how often are people walking down the street using a laptop? Stationary hot spots go well with the current practice of parking your butt somewhere for a while to do work.
Of course if you want to be searching google all the time, anywhere, at the slightest provocation, you're out of luck...
If you can pull it off, it's always nice to write cross-platform code... then you can use Visual C++ to do a fair amount of debugging...
It's not a wireless monitor, it's a WinCE tablet. You can use it as the WinXP equivalent of an X terminal, apparently.
re:your coding-boast: um, how about CVS? Debugging? project management?
I recently installed a win2k dual boot on my linux machine. the only program I have installed under windows is visual studio. why? because it sucks less than any other option available at this time.
Actually, this is kind of the point of a lot of work at the Media Lab (where this hack was done) - corporations encourage you to hack at their stuff, because they give the Media Lab lots of money and want to get cool product ideas back. That seems to be the basic working relationship.
I thought it was especially cute that Bush claims his administration will be free of "scandals and alibis" ... like the story that came out today about his latest (unreported, lied-about) youthful indiscretion (at the ripe old age of 30) - an arrest for drunk driving in 1976. What an ass. What a bastard. I can't believe people are falling for this guy's lines.
I thoroughly disagree. I read Dune when I was 13 years old and thought it rocked. Complexity is good, dammit... 13 years old is old enough to start experiencing it.
Hmmm, ok, that's pretty much what I figured.
>#include the obligatory "credit cards are really, really a stupid way to exchange funds" rant.
What obligatory rant would that be? A "there's a better way which currently exists" or a "there's a better way that could be implemented"?
Oh, and it's not really a credit card, but a debit card. Not that that's a huge improvement.
Ok, so, I have a Visa card.
What should I do? Anything?
"Windows-based systems"?
AFAIK, AOL uses Unix boxen running the quasi-recently open-sourced AOLserver. No windows. They know it sucks.
Reference:
http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/community.html
"... (America Online successfully handles 2.5 billion requests per day with an almost identical architecture: AOLserver + Sybase + Unix)..."
--Jim
An interview with Steve Case on his new employees.
realvideo
quicktime (xanim-compatible, I think)
--Jim
Dammit! Io is practically one big active volcano. The icy worldlet to which you refer is Europa.
This person is misinformed (or at least mistaken), and nicely illustrates a problem I have with default Score:2. There are a nontrivial number of people with karma boosts who make inane and/or just incorrect posts which start out at score 2. This is annoying.
You wrote:
"It is interesting to note that the Shumerian god Marduk is described as crashing into earth at some set date a long time ago (all their gods are anologies to planets...they kept insanely precise and detailed records of all the stars).
I wouldn't discredit this theory outright."
Hmmmm. Given that this is a conveniently relevant story for an ancient civilization to have as a piece of central dogma (and that you mispelled "Sumerian"), I'm suspicious. Do you have a reference?
Neat story though.
Also check out this Matrix spoof (video):o des/cs11.mov o des/cs11.rm
http://www.zdnet.com/computerstew/video/qt/epis
or
http://www.zdnet.com/computerstew/video/g2/epis
--Jim
Yeah, I agree. In fact, I think I've pretty much decided that Sterling is completely full of shit. Everything I've ever read by him was similarly discombobulated and uninteresting.
Too bad he's not actually _doing_ something to bring about his vision of "The Future" instead of just babbling about it.
A /. magazine would be a complete waste of time. The stuff I like about /. is:
-keeps me up to date. I check the homepage probably ten times a day. A print version would be much slower.
-has interesting comments here and there. These would not be available in a print version
-it's searchable. This is a _huge_ plus.
None of these things are options in a print magazine.
What I really really need is a basic terminal that I can carry around. Let's say a 14" LCD flatpanel, plus a pointing device (maybe like the eraser-mouse-plus-buttons on an IBM thinkpad). It should have a port to connect a keyboard, or perhaps it should have a tiny keyboard (or handwriting recognition?) included.
Note that I don't want it to be smart at all. Basically, I want a portable X terminal. That would rock. It would of course need to be wirelessly connected to my desktop machine.
If one of these was currently available, I'd buy it.
As has been mentioned before, there are problems with the gray goo scenario.
You said: "We must make sure we stop before our nanomachines can reproduce themselves in anything but highly exotic enviornments." What does that mean? I require a highly exotic environment to reproduce: enormous inputs of raw materials, some way to get rid of waste products, a certain temperature range, etc. etc.; it seems extremely unlikely that nanomachines could reproduce out of control, simply because they'd eventually run out of some limiting reagent. I suppose some things are readily available in large supply, but you can't make much from just seawater or just silicon (two very abundant substances, here on Earth).
Besides, how are all those nanites going to power themselves?
You wrote: "The body sleeps, the soul lives on."
For any number of reasons that don't need to be brought up yet again, I disagree. As far as I can tell, when we die, we end.
But isn't that ok?
Why are we so afraid of death? People have a beginning and an end, and should be aware of that. I think that knowledge and acceptance of your own mortality makes you a better person. It makes you more appreciative of the time you have to live. It makes you care more about what is happening in the world, because it affects you, and you've only got so much time. It encourages you to go after your dreams rather than go for traditional "success", because if you only have a limited amount of time, why waste it on something you don't like doing?
I think the idea that the soul goes on is detrimental because it encourages people to dismiss reality in favor of an imagined reward that is cut off from our lives by the sharp division of death. Why live life to the fullest when what you "really" should be doing is preparing for eternal life once you're outta here?
On the other hand, maybe people would relax a bit more if our lifespans were extended to, say, 200 healthy years. Maybe things would slow down and people would think about the consequences of their actions more, and feel less pressure.
Maybe not. Hmmm.
>"Why does it seem that evolution has not taken place underground? And does he also intend to "dis" the more or less generally accepted idea that most, nearly all of the energy that supports life comes from the sun?"
Um... where did you get the idea that evolution hasn't taken place underground? All evolution means is that the genetic makeup of the organisms has changed over time, according to natural selection. It doesn't require any sort of "progress"; the reason "higher" animals exist in the surface biosphere is because they represent decent reproductive strategies in that situation. A large multicellular organism is a very poor adaptive strategy in the hot, cramped, resource-poor environment underground.
And there is already plenty of evidence of organisms that do not depend on the sun for their energy input (such as the tube worms etc. mentioned in the article). He isn't "dis"-ing anything. Bacteria have been found that live off of hydrocarbon deposits; their metabolisms are totally unlike ours, but they are nonetheless alive.
The article has a low enough science-cluefulness quotient that I suspect its explanation of where the petroleum deposits come from is as garbled as all that talk about the Big Bang. In a recent issue of Discover (I know, not the most reliable, but bear with me), there was an article on microbes which perhaps are responsible for the creation of ore veins through their metabolic action - perhaps something similar is taking place here. Maybe the microbes feed off whatever it is they feed off of, and as they grow and divide, their waste products form a petroleum deposit?