...while accounting for the changes in air travel in 2035 -- when air traffic is expected to double -- would require "a radical change,"
These guys are in a clusterfuck headspace. They are basically throwing fantasies off each other.
Given the present state of known oil reserves (and the difficulties in accessing those reserves), the current depletion rate, and the expanding rate of oil usage in the developing world, NO ONE seriously expects air traffic to double by 2035. No one except a handful of tech nerds in NASA and the Defense Department think-tanks who get paid big bucks to let their imaginations run wild without any consideration of the conditions in the real world.
The airlines will be lucky to exist at all by 2035. In all likelyhood, there will be one airline in the world that offers once daily flights across the major oceans at enormous cost for the public, and small-jet charter service for the ultra-rich. The hoards of lower-middle-class masses (that you and me and rest of the Slashdaughters reading this) are not going to jetting to Vegas or Hawaii for wild-weekends as they did during the millenium years 1985-2010. Every six months we read in the business sections about another national airline merging with a major carrier and the major carriers merging with each other. What was it last month? Oh yeah, United and Continental merging because they are both going broke as individual companies.
I also fail to see how a plane design that looks more or less exactly like all the other plane designs is going to be able to fly 100+ passengers with 70% less fuel. Maybe I missed the football-field-sized helium balloon that was attached to the fuselage (and cropped from the picture). Oh yeah, the front nose looks beveled. And this is supposed to give it 'super lift'. If this were the case, don't you think that Boeing and/or Tupolev would have figured that out twenty years ago?
Again, these guys get paid to fantasize. Not produce reality. They're the same type of guys who promised us Howard Johnson's restaurants on space stations and PanAm weekly service to luxury hotels on the moon in the film 2001:A Space Odyssey forty years ago. And what was 2001 in reality? Millions of screaming kids and dorks in shorts riding a trashy 30-year old 737 to Branson and Disneyland.
Trust your instincts. Don't trust MIT/NASA reports.
a president nominates someone to the Supreme Court who had access to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook at the age of 15.
This is why it is important to realize that everyone has multiple lives: private, public, serious, fun, sexual, intimate, bigoted, religious, etc...
It is not enough to inquire about a person's character. People have many characters. The characters or personae overlap somewhat, but not greatly.
Consider the English judicial court. The lawyers and judges put on ceremonial robes and wigs to specifically separate their lives, personalities, and past histories outside of the courtroom from the current business inside the courtroom.
Consider the thousands of women who have posed for men's magazines. Millions of men use their images for sexual projection ('wanking' for all you insensitive UK sods). Thousands of men have found themselves in the situation where they are working with women that they masturbated to, and felt an intimate connection for a ten second window. Only a serious jerk would dig up the old magazines or internet erotic photos and flash them to the other co-workers. Porn is a separate realm: what is in the stroke rag or porn film stays there. The woman that you work with is not the same woman whose picture is in the magazine, even if it is the same person. One person; multiple personae. Simple Puritan brains can't handle this concept. But,hell, you mastered C language and Linux APIs, you can master real-world sophistication also.
We see this also in the peculiar American obsession for destroying people's careers over the presence of molecules of marijuana in their urine. What a weird obsession! 'You are the purity of your piss!'. When people are stoned they are not the same personae as when they are sober. Both conditions are valid. But have their place. The only valid reason to destroy a person's career over their intoxicational preference is if (and only if) they are uncontrollably intoxicated in a situation where they are supposed to be sober. Outside of that, different drugs make different personae. Only fascists refuse to accept this.
These politicians digging into the judge candidate's background and demanding every brain fart of the candidate's past are all assholes. They are transparent chickenshit party hacks of a corrupt and bankrupt political system. They have some minor importance now, but they won't in future. All they will have then is the eternal hatred and contempt of the people trying to live with the consequences of their stupidity.
If you do this stuff, and you are doing it to people who are not directly invading your country, then you are a war criminal.
The coolness of your technology does not excuse your actions.
Since you are not doing it to me, and... the people who at whom you are directing this cool death tech are not important, and... they did offer shelter and assistance to those came to your country and murdered thousands of your people, I'm not condemning you.
I'm not your judge.
But you are war criminals by any civilized standards. So accept it.
I'm unemployed, and not likely to ever get un-unemployed.
Send me a $100, and I'll send you a 500 Gig hard drive with * 100 * movies on it. All the Star Trek and the Star Wars films.
I'll fill the rest of the titles with general cool stuff like James Bond and Clint Eastwood. I'll even include some older great films like 'Black Sunday' (beautiful Marthe Keller as a Swiss-Palestinian terrorist telling wack-job vet Bruce Dern: 'Zer Ahre No Accidents!'); 'Marathon Man' ('Ees it safe? Dyou shoold take bezzer care of your teeth'); a few warm-hearted click flicks, a 40's Bogart or two ('here's looking at you, kid. We'll always have Paris'). Speaking of Paris, I'll include La Femme Nikita, Jules And Jim, and the original 1946 Beauty And The Beast. I'll even include "El Topo", which is the weirdest film that you have never heard of (just ask any 60-year-old stoner professor at your university)
Better deal for everyone than what you would get from Paramount Studios!!
This might be a good place to recommend using the 'secret oscilloscope' that is in every PC sold in the past ten years. The audio line input is a dual 44.1K sample per second AC input with nearly unlimited digital storage.
Get one of the PC oscilloscope programs that are available for free.
The disadvantages of the PC audio card oscilloscope are three:
It does NOT measure DC voltage input.
Its input range is about 2 volts AC Peak-to-Peak maximum!
Its max input signal speed is about 20,000 Hertz.
Useless for serious electronics work, but fantastic for beginners and for audio work!
And free. Free is very good price,... especially for a digital storage oscilloscope.
Don't overlook a used PC power supply. They have +3.3, +5 , +12,-5 and -12 regulated voltages at 10 or more amps available (less for the +/- 12v). Connect a 10 ohm/10 watt 'white rectangle ceramic' resistor between one of the +5v and ground to simulate a minimum load for the internal switching voltage regulator.
These are often the cheapest regulated power supplies available once you get a simple 7805 or LM317 low-current beginning circuit running and need an amp or two for an intermediate project.
Really... not kidding... become a dumpster diver for electronics. Pull junk electronics out of the dumpster and open the cases. Learn to identify the parts. De-solder them from the internal circuit boards. Start a collection of parts. Throw what you don't keep (the real garbage) back into the dumpster. Avoid old televisions. They can hold a charge on their picture tube and that tube can implode if dropped. But old televisions are not supposed to be in dumpsters anymore anyway. (Take them to the GoodWill).
If you can't ID the parts, take a small picture of them with a digital camera and post the image to an AVR or PIC microcontroller or electronics web site, asking 'what is this?'.
The web is fantastic for learning electronics! Thirty years ago an unknown part could stay a mystery for a long time. IC data books could be difficult to obtain. Now just type the letter/number combination printed on the part into Google and you often can find exactly what it is and what it does in seconds. Ask a question on the web and knowledgeable people answer it at your comprehension level.
If you are interested in music, buy a few cheap guitar stompboxes on eBay and take them apart. Many hundreds of schematics are available on the web for stompboxes. And the best part is...if you mess up the circuitry hopelessly, someone will still buy it again on eBay for almost the price that you paid for it. Plus your guitar playing gets better.
Hollywood is obsessed with secret, powerful, out-of-control, quasi-government agencies because Hollywood is a secret, powerful, out-of-control, quasi-government organization. They are obsessed with destroying the finances and lives of thousands of random people in order to obtain and retain control of the cultural and emotional mental frameworks of most people in the developed world.
This fascination with the themes of Phillip K. Dick is only a reflection of their own neurotic narcissism.
I think that this bill points out the need for all of us to know a little bit about the electronics involved with digital communication. We basically need to know enough to connect our computers together into small nets that can be independently linked to the world internet.
Our political masters in Washington have the idea that internet is a giant centrally-controlled utility that can be completely shutdown when some political leader orders it done.
It is quite possible that it is true for the web in its present form. All our computer links actually are based on centralized fiber lines. Whether the politicians/generals/CEOs could order the internet shutdown and the technological community would actually comply is a conspiratorial question.
I think that if the order came down from DC to 'turn off' the internet, it would be delayed and partially ignored. There is no centralized 'internet switch' to turn off. A mandated shut-down would at best be only partial because (the politicians forget) the internet was designed to be not be able to be shut-down by force or dictatorial order.
It would still be a good idea to have a basic understanding of electronics, short-wave ham radio communication, and fundamental internet protocols in order to patch together a link back to web if your local ISP shut off for any reason.
I am an Oregonian living in pre-secessionist Cascadia/Ecotopia. Our libraries have books, DVDs, audio CDs, graphic novels/zines, newspapers, magazines, broadband web access, and Wi-Fi. No musical instruments, electronics, software, or games.
Our libraries are crowded with people from all over the world. Trying to learn how to live and thrive in their new country. After our separation from the USA, which will probably happen within twenty years, I hope that they choose to stay with us. Even if it is difficult during the transition years.
Why bother? The libraries already have DVDs on the shelf. Most suburban public library branches have hundreds of titles available. Plus they are all listed on the web and available for reserve. Go to the local branch, check them out, watch them for a week, copy them (with DVD decrypter or DVDshrink) if you choose to, bring them back, repeat.
All legal, all free, all under-the-radar of the corporate monkeys and their lawyers.
The purpose of the HR department is to come up with bizarre and absurd reasons why mid-level supervisors can't get the human resources that they need to keep their division profitable.
All the other functions of a 'human resources' department could be done by computer or out-sourced to some distant third-world country. So the alleged humans in the HR department need to constantly come up with reasons to justify their salaries. So they specialize in coming up with weird and irrelevant reasons to prevent YOU from being hired.
My last job interview had a 22-year old ask me to explain a job termination that happened to me before she (always a she) was even born! How do you answer something like that?
When Salon.com paywalled they didn't deny free access to the entire website. They just make it quite annoying to access for the people who didn't pay. Salon.com is still around and occasionally interesting. Especially when they can get Camille Paglia to do a column. They seem to have a lot of people on staff that do little more than come up with new ways to annoy their web site viewers. But they were the first people to tell me about MP3 files twelve years ago, so I'm eternally grateful to them for that.
The worst paywalls are the video clips that make you wait through a 30 second to one minute commercial before they will show what you clicked on. I just jump out of these situations because I hate commercials and I have seen too many already in my life.
The ugliest website that I have ever seen is Asia Times (www.atimes.com). Good content is buried somewhere deep in all this mess. Ebay is getting to be quite ugly too, as is Yahoo!. I'm switching my main e-main address to Google mail so that I don't have to wait for all the schmaltz useless photos on Yahoo that clog my dial-up bandwidth.
Charging a pound a day to read news is ill-advised. It will transform this man's newspaper from being the anchor media of the community to being just another website for the rich and their wack-job worshipers.
Newspapers a hundred-years ago were the voice and rallying point of the many diverse communities in the USA and the voice of the middle class in Europe. There were many and each had strong and opposing editorial positions. After World War II the newspapers consolidated into a few major corporations and greatly softened their strident editorial positions. They started to become focused on local advertising, legal announcements, and providing a printed 'voice of record' for centralized government and corporate positions and viewpoints.
In the 1980s multiple papers and editions in cities disappeared. Most major cities had only one daily and one 'alternative' weekly for young adults. At the millennium, the function of providing news and advertisements started being done by the web and newspapers began to be perceived as irrelevant. A large number of people born after WWII hated their local established daily because the ultra-conservative editorial board would always take the wrong position on every single issue, year after year. Other middle-of-the-road young people found little in the daily that was useful to their lives. One by one, they stopped buying the local paper as the years went by. Editions of major city papers, NY Times, Washington Post, started being published in minor cities.
The wealthy loved the daily paper. They were deluded into believing that the conservative editorial positions were a manifestation of the political views of the people and not a paid reflection of their own perspectives. They poured millions into the dailys, year after year.
Then a few years ago, a tipping point happened. The amount of money coming in didn't pay the costs of the dailys. The papers went 'thin', losing 50-70% of their daily newsprint and concentrated on food ads, kittens-stuck-in-trees human-interest stories, obituaries, and comics. The young get the functions of a daily paper from the web and cable TV. The old feel just lost and the middle class/aged just don't care as long as the SUV still runs.
The global newspaper kings should make their news outlets and web sites free. The sources that they use to get the information are more interested in getting their positions out to the international public than they are interested in selling stories to newspapers. They will use focused web sites. Centralized 'journalism' will wither and just become a forgotten cultural characteristic of the 20th century. Murdock appears to be too old, too isolated, and too rich to understand this.
No two languages can be more different than English and Lao. Mastering both is serious intellectual accomplishment.
But here in Beaverton Oregon it is the standard practice of companies that operate in the vast Southeast Asian community to pay employees fifty cents an hour more if they are fluent in both English and one or more Southeast Asian languages.
Yes, I do know how much more money you can make by being bilingual in radically different languages. You make 50 cents an hour more than the people who only know English.
I'm not bitter, I'm realistic about the value of spending 10000 hours mastering a difficult language.
The translating computer you have? Built by smart people who didn't waste their lives wasted and in bed. Every great scientific advance is made by smart people who waste their lives getting high and fucking. Smarter people use these technological advances in order to live as well as 'the smart people' and enjoy getting high and fucking while the 'smart people' toil in the lab. Welcome to real world.
Actually, computers are rather bad at language translation.
I believe that you mean that software is rather bad at translation, computers are good at memorization. Using computers to handle the memorization frees us to explore software and human intelligence to do translation without the burden of memorization.
I use a five-point scale for machine translation. Level one is individual words and kanji. Level two is phrases and sentences. Level three is paragraphs and paragraph clusters, like this message. Level four is newspaper level and films. Level five is literature and diplomacy. Each level would require (I assume) one to two orders of magnitude of computing power to attain from the previous level. Current machine language translation that is freely available (from web sources like Google and www.systranet.com) operates current between levels one and two. Good software could bring us to between levels four and five with existing microprocessors.
Language translation progress can be likened to Columbus' being halfway across the Atlantic. We know exactly what we're looking for, and we firmly believe that it is obtainable and profitable. We just don't know exactly where we are or how long it will take to get where we want to be.
Transferring memorization to machines would free human intelligence to make vast advances in linguistics. By analyzing translation loops (going from a primary language to a second language and then translating the results back to the primary language) we can find why some software algorithms work in some languages and others fail. Why would Chomsky-based software translate "out of sight, out of mind" to "invisible idiot" and Sapir-based algorithms return nonsense when looping from English to Mandarin but not when looping from Mardarin to Mayan?
This entire field is wide open. Linguistic software is the 'killer ap' of the 21st century in the way that 'office equipment' transformation (spreadsheets, word processors, etc...) were the great money maker of the first generation of computers...but no practical computer can replace the wonder that is the human mind when it comes to language-related tasks.
No disrespect or sarcasm intended, but IMHO that statement is like saying that no calculator can bring the mental satisfaction that comes from successfully multiplying two ten-digit numbers in Middle school arithmetic class.
Everyone here seems to be missing the point. We have advanced powerful cheap technology that is infinitely better than a human brain at memorizing things like character symbols and vocabulary.
Don't memorize anything. Let the computer do the translating. That's what computers are good for. Humans are not good at this. That is why it is so hard. So do the obvious and let the computer do the translation.
Got a little camera like the one in cell phones? Plug that camera into your hand held PC/internet/MP3player/telephone iTurd whatever. Point the camera at the kanji that you want translated. Press the button on the iTurd. Glance briefly at the little iTurd screen. Trust the iTurd ap program to have done an optical kanji recognition on the characters that it just imaged and is giving you the correct English/Finnish/Thai//Wolof/Whatever translation.
Tech people seem to have this obsession with doing things that prove to themselves and other people that they are 'smart'. They believe that just because they have mastered technology, then they are under some obligation to themselves or their class that they must master all things that are difficult in order to recertify their 'smart person' credential. So they feel the need to memorize 5000 kanji, or play a difficult Bach invention on an aucostic piano, or run a marathon, or to get themselves killed attempting to 'win the hearts and minds' of people who have neither.
Don't waste your time, and abandon your hang-ups about your smartness. Let the $200 computer master 50000 kanji, let your $50 MIDI synth play Bach, let your car take 20 miles in comfort, and let the expendable fools go to the other side of the world and get killed.
Your 'smartness' is certified by your unwillingness to do these things yourself, the hard and dumb way.
I studied Japanese. It was about the time that personal computers were just beginning in 1979. The first time that I saw an optical-character wand read digits (in 1981) I knew that there was NO FUCKING WAY that I was going to spend 10000 hours committing 10000 kanji to memory. That's what computers do. I'm a better person because I didn't do it.
Please spare me the horseshit about how the discipline of memorizing and learning makes a better person and builds character. Look at those assholes who spend their life memorizing the Quran, and then go blow up a bus or day-care center.
Memorization lost its validity the day that computers started selling for $50. And that was a long time ago. So what that I can't pick up a Japanese newspaper and know what it says just by looking at it! I've got a $100 1GigaHertz 400MegaFlop microPC in my hand that does it just as well.
And I spent the 10000 hours smoking weed and fucking beautiful girls instead of memorizing kanji. Life is a series of difficult choices and hard trade-offs.
"An 11k app is not going to make me, or my computer, say 'Good Bye World'"
It is if your computer is a 38-cent Atmel AVR tiny 10, which only has enough space for 512 12-bit instruction words. This chip is about half the size of a sunflower seed, but is faster, and, in several ways, more powerful, than the original $5000 IBM PC from 1981.
Get away from the idea of Gigahertz desktops and $1000 laptops and join the real computer revolution!
For me, if it costs more that $5, it's not a computer that I take seriously. It's just a 20th-century digital processing appliance.
You aren't going to hell for this, and I'm not going to stand for the other Slashdaughters giving you grief for being the first to ask the right questions.
Your point is the most straightforward one that must always be asked about any new technology - Is it going to make life better or worse? For who?
It is ironic that we (the world's technologists - which is us, fellow Slashdaughters) are creating machines that will eventually be able to replace humans in the workplace at the same time that the world's population is entering the vertical section of a 'hockey stick' growth curve.
Your point is dead-on: there are billions of people who can do the work better than any current robot can and they are far smarter than any robot will ever be for another century if not longer. And yes, they are cheap, self-maintaining, and self-reproducing. And if you control their life-support and religious systems, they don't give you any trouble. And give them the right drugs, they will be happy in their place. There are always going to be 10% that won't accept their condition, but that is true in any social conditions, cultures, and historical eras. Ours is no different.
The population explosion in the third world is a direct result of the technological innovations that resulted from cheap energy sources that are characteristic of the modern era that began in the late 19th century. If, and there is a lot of disagreement on this subject among people who do know what they are talking about, the cheap energy era ends, then the population will decrease. From war and disease and psychological trauma, people will stop having children as they did in the 20th century. It is possible, but not assured, that the rate of technological innovation could fall as a result of population decline and the end of the cheap energy era. As the 20th century was a positive feedback loop of technological and population growth, so might the 21st century be a negative feedback loop of technological reversals that can't be halted despite the best efforts of the Slashdaughters. Nothing is inevitable.
But, robots are a long way from taking away skilled manufacturing jobs. And population growth levels off when third-world societies enter the middle class.
So we should presently use robots to do the jobs that have the most economic return or do the most to reduce the human cost. Stuff like clearing mine fields, picking strawberries, and manufacturing/cleaning in toxic environments. And make decent jobs for the people that are here presently.
Be flexible and keep an open mind. Listen closely to what different people are saying and try to do no harm. You'll be cool.
Generally, plastic is not electrically conductive. Which makes it good for mounting electronics. But it is also not heat conductive. Which makes it near worthless for mounting.
A non-electric conductive, but heat conductive material would be very useful. Especially if it is CHEAP. It could be used to distribute heat in buildings and not just on circuit boards.
" models their 'musical personalities' to create new recordings,"
Anyone who can get $10.7 MILLION dollars on the basis of such a flimsy claim deserves respect for their bullshitting ability.
If you want to know what Lady Gaga (who the fuck is she?) would sound like if she were 'musically repersonalized' by Space Captain James T. Hendrix, then take her recordings (I assume that she is some kind of recording 'artist' since she has been on the cover of Rolling Stone) and run them through a flanger, phase shifter, distortion unit, and wah-wah pedal. Play it really loud, take a shit load of mescaline, and -voila- you have Hendrix playing in the style of 'Lady Gaga' (who is this creature and why is she in the entertainment media?).
In all seriousness,... It's just music. It's not a cure for cancer. It's not a car that get 100 miles to a gallon of gas. It's not a cure for AIDS or weaponized smallpox.
It's just...fucking...music. Stop pretending that it's so serious. And don't give them any more money. Jeez, 10 million fucking dollars for this horseshit!!!
I quite agree. So much of psychology is a matter of circular definitions; which quickly degenerates into psycho-babble that only accentuates the tenuous utility of the psychologists.
A person is depressed because they spend too much time on their computer; depression is related to computer use; computer use can cause depression; depression is a mental condition that is characterized by the behavior and social interactivity of people who enjoy computer usage; and so on.... Doesn't mean shit, but provides a paycheck to 'professionals' who can't understand why someone else would find C++ fascinating.
Ignore these people and you'll feel less depressed.
In their defense, personal computer programming is much more complicated than it was in 1982. The machines and the hardware is several orders of magnitude faster and denser than it was then. The basics do change.
Don't forget that the primary reason for the existence of Apple Inc is to facilitate the orderly and systematic transfer of money from the bank accounts of bored yuppies to the account of Steven Jobs. The toys and the technology is a means to an end. Home computers started in the 1970s as toys for hackers, became business office tools in the 1980s, design and educational tools in the 1990s, and home-entertainment/communications centers in the 2000s. (..and destroying the previous industry giants in each field in the process)
People wishing to provide for their kids the experiences that they had programming 8-bit home computers should get into Aurdino and other small-scale microcontroller-based systems. The chips are cheap. The programmers are low-cost. The assemblers and compilers are free and open-sourced. Sensors are cheap, as are LCD-character displays. Graphics LCD modules are getting cheaper, but are a long way from being cheap. Gigabyte storage of data is dirt-cheap as SD cards, but they can have a difficult learning curve. In this field, projects are often shared. Tinkering and development is encouraged. Questions, even beginning questions, get answered.
When PCs and Macs get locked down in place, the microcontroller communities sprout up like mushrooms. This is the place for tinkerers. But, please, don't let the people at Microsoft and Apple know!
If there's a 'must-see' then we don't know about it until it's out of the first-run theaters. How else are you going to know that the film is good? People that go to first run movies, spend $10 each for tickets, $25 for babysitter, $5 for popcorn, and $4 for popcorn aren't going to tell you that the movie wasn't anything but good. And the second week people are always going to say the film is good to prove that they can wait for quality.
No, you gotta wait until the movie reaches the second-run $3 theaters. If it isn't any good then it won't get to these theaters. The studio will blitz the opening night with deceptive ads for a turkey and then go straight to DVD.
If it's a real 'must-see' then just watch the previews/trailers until you know the whole movie. Your average Hollywood movie can have its entire look/feel/plot experienced in a three minute preview (Spiderman III, Superman Ten, anyone?).
Nah, If it's worth seeing, then it's worth waiting for the DVD. And if it's really good, then it will make it to the library shelf where it will be free for a week or more.
And if it's great, then it's timeless quality. So why not wait a year or two to see it? What difference does it make? Now's the time to go to the library and check out for free all the excellent movies that you decided not to see because you didn't want to spend $10 on an independent or foreign film when it was in the theaters.
Myself, I always save the best for last. Maybe this week I'll watch this movie called 'Star Wars' that I've been hearing people rave about for so long.
A giant sun tower or two in Arizona is an interesting idea. But it makes more sense to build a huge lightning capacitor.
There's this place in Arizona where lightning strikes are common and happen nearly every night. Something in the atmosphere, the heat, and humidity.
So why not dig a huge hole in the ground, fill it with aluminum foil and electrolytic, then quickly and carefully build a huge lightning rod. The lightning will constantly arc to the giant million farad capacitor in the ground. It gets recharged up every night and the 'supercap' powers a small city or suburb.
Slashdot Mirror
...while accounting for the changes in air travel in 2035 -- when air traffic is expected to double -- would require "a radical change,"
These guys are in a clusterfuck headspace. They are basically throwing fantasies off each other.
Given the present state of known oil reserves (and the difficulties in accessing those reserves), the current depletion rate, and the expanding rate of oil usage in the developing world, NO ONE seriously expects air traffic to double by 2035. No one except a handful of tech nerds in NASA and the Defense Department think-tanks who get paid big bucks to let their imaginations run wild without any consideration of the conditions in the real world.
The airlines will be lucky to exist at all by 2035. In all likelyhood, there will be one airline in the world that offers once daily flights across the major oceans at enormous cost for the public, and small-jet charter service for the ultra-rich. The hoards of lower-middle-class masses (that you and me and rest of the Slashdaughters reading this) are not going to jetting to Vegas or Hawaii for wild-weekends as they did during the millenium years 1985-2010. Every six months we read in the business sections about another national airline merging with a major carrier and the major carriers merging with each other. What was it last month? Oh yeah, United and Continental merging because they are both going broke as individual companies.
I also fail to see how a plane design that looks more or less exactly like all the other plane designs is going to be able to fly 100+ passengers with 70% less fuel. Maybe I missed the football-field-sized helium balloon that was attached to the fuselage (and cropped from the picture). Oh yeah, the front nose looks beveled. And this is supposed to give it 'super lift'. If this were the case, don't you think that Boeing and/or Tupolev would have figured that out twenty years ago?
Again, these guys get paid to fantasize. Not produce reality. They're the same type of guys who promised us Howard Johnson's restaurants on space stations and PanAm weekly service to luxury hotels on the moon in the film 2001:A Space Odyssey forty years ago. And what was 2001 in reality? Millions of screaming kids and dorks in shorts riding a trashy 30-year old 737 to Branson and Disneyland.
Trust your instincts. Don't trust MIT/NASA reports.
a president nominates someone to the Supreme Court who had access to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook at the age of 15.
This is why it is important to realize that everyone has multiple lives: private, public, serious, fun, sexual, intimate, bigoted, religious, etc...
It is not enough to inquire about a person's character. People have many characters. The characters or personae overlap somewhat, but not greatly.
Consider the English judicial court. The lawyers and judges put on ceremonial robes and wigs to specifically separate their lives, personalities, and past histories outside of the courtroom from the current business inside the courtroom.
Consider the thousands of women who have posed for men's magazines. Millions of men use their images for sexual projection ('wanking' for all you insensitive UK sods). Thousands of men have found themselves in the situation where they are working with women that they masturbated to, and felt an intimate connection for a ten second window. Only a serious jerk would dig up the old magazines or internet erotic photos and flash them to the other co-workers. Porn is a separate realm: what is in the stroke rag or porn film stays there. The woman that you work with is not the same woman whose picture is in the magazine, even if it is the same person. One person; multiple personae. Simple Puritan brains can't handle this concept. But,hell, you mastered C language and Linux APIs, you can master real-world sophistication also.
We see this also in the peculiar American obsession for destroying people's careers over the presence of molecules of marijuana in their urine. What a weird obsession! 'You are the purity of your piss!'. When people are stoned they are not the same personae as when they are sober. Both conditions are valid. But have their place. The only valid reason to destroy a person's career over their intoxicational preference is if (and only if) they are uncontrollably intoxicated in a situation where they are supposed to be sober. Outside of that, different drugs make different personae. Only fascists refuse to accept this.
These politicians digging into the judge candidate's background and demanding every brain fart of the candidate's past are all assholes. They are transparent chickenshit party hacks of a corrupt and bankrupt political system. They have some minor importance now, but they won't in future. All they will have then is the eternal hatred and contempt of the people trying to live with the consequences of their stupidity.
If you do this stuff, and you are doing it to people who are not directly invading your country, then you are a war criminal.
The coolness of your technology does not excuse your actions.
Since you are not doing it to me, and...
the people who at whom you are directing this cool death tech are not important, and...
they did offer shelter and assistance to those came to your country and murdered thousands of your people,
I'm not condemning you.
I'm not your judge.
But you are war criminals by any civilized standards. So accept it.
I'm unemployed, and not likely to ever get un-unemployed.
Send me a $100, and I'll send you a 500 Gig hard drive with * 100 * movies on it. All the Star Trek and the Star Wars films.
I'll fill the rest of the titles with general cool stuff like James Bond and Clint Eastwood. I'll even include some older great films like 'Black Sunday' (beautiful Marthe Keller as a Swiss-Palestinian terrorist telling wack-job vet Bruce Dern: 'Zer Ahre No Accidents!'); 'Marathon Man' ('Ees it safe? Dyou shoold take bezzer care of your teeth'); a few warm-hearted click flicks, a 40's Bogart or two ('here's looking at you, kid. We'll always have Paris'). Speaking of Paris, I'll include La Femme Nikita, Jules And Jim, and the original 1946 Beauty And The Beast. I'll even include "El Topo", which is the weirdest film that you have never heard of (just ask any 60-year-old stoner professor at your university)
Better deal for everyone than what you would get from Paramount Studios!!
This might be a good place to recommend using the 'secret oscilloscope' that is in every PC sold in the past ten years. The audio line input is a dual 44.1K sample per second AC input with nearly unlimited digital storage.
Get one of the PC oscilloscope programs that are available for free.
The disadvantages of the PC audio card oscilloscope are three:
It does NOT measure DC voltage input.
Its input range is about 2 volts AC Peak-to-Peak maximum!
Its max input signal speed is about 20,000 Hertz.
Useless for serious electronics work, but fantastic for beginners and for audio work!
And free. Free is very good price,... especially for a digital storage oscilloscope.
Don't overlook a used PC power supply. They have +3.3, +5 , +12 ,-5 and -12 regulated voltages at 10 or more amps available (less for the +/- 12v). Connect a 10 ohm/10 watt 'white rectangle ceramic' resistor between one of the +5v and ground to simulate a minimum load for the internal switching voltage regulator.
These are often the cheapest regulated power supplies available once you get a simple 7805 or LM317 low-current beginning circuit running and need an amp or two for an intermediate project.
Really... not kidding... become a dumpster diver for electronics. Pull junk electronics out of the dumpster and open the cases. Learn to identify the parts. De-solder them from the internal circuit boards. Start a collection of parts. Throw what you don't keep (the real garbage) back into the dumpster. Avoid old televisions. They can hold a charge on their picture tube and that tube can implode if dropped. But old televisions are not supposed to be in dumpsters anymore anyway. (Take them to the GoodWill).
If you can't ID the parts, take a small picture of them with a digital camera and post the image to an AVR or PIC microcontroller or electronics web site, asking 'what is this?'.
The web is fantastic for learning electronics! Thirty years ago an unknown part could stay a mystery for a long time. IC data books could be difficult to obtain. Now just type the letter/number combination printed on the part into Google and you often can find exactly what it is and what it does in seconds. Ask a question on the web and knowledgeable people answer it at your comprehension level.
If you are interested in music, buy a few cheap guitar stompboxes on eBay and take them apart. Many hundreds of schematics are available on the web for stompboxes. And the best part is...if you mess up the circuitry hopelessly, someone will still buy it again on eBay for almost the price that you paid for it. Plus your guitar playing gets better.
Hollywood is obsessed with secret, powerful, out-of-control, quasi-government agencies because Hollywood is a secret, powerful, out-of-control, quasi-government organization. They are obsessed with destroying the finances and lives of thousands of random people in order to obtain and retain control of the cultural and emotional mental frameworks of most people in the developed world.
This fascination with the themes of Phillip K. Dick is only a reflection of their own neurotic narcissism.
I think that this bill points out the need for all of us to know a little bit about the electronics involved with digital communication. We basically need to know enough to connect our computers together into small nets that can be independently linked to the world internet.
Our political masters in Washington have the idea that internet is a giant centrally-controlled utility that can be completely shutdown when some political leader orders it done.
It is quite possible that it is true for the web in its present form. All our computer links actually are based on centralized fiber lines. Whether the politicians/generals/CEOs could order the internet shutdown and the technological community would actually comply is a conspiratorial question.
I think that if the order came down from DC to 'turn off' the internet, it would be delayed and partially ignored. There is no centralized 'internet switch' to turn off. A mandated shut-down would at best be only partial because (the politicians forget) the internet was designed to be not be able to be shut-down by force or dictatorial order.
It would still be a good idea to have a basic understanding of electronics, short-wave ham radio communication, and fundamental internet protocols in order to patch together a link back to web if your local ISP shut off for any reason.
I am an Oregonian living in pre-secessionist Cascadia/Ecotopia. Our libraries have books, DVDs, audio CDs, graphic novels/zines, newspapers, magazines, broadband web access, and Wi-Fi. No musical instruments, electronics, software, or games.
Our libraries are crowded with people from all over the world. Trying to learn how to live and thrive in their new country. After our separation from the USA, which will probably happen within twenty years, I hope that they choose to stay with us. Even if it is difficult during the transition years.
Why bother? The libraries already have DVDs on the shelf. Most suburban public library branches have hundreds of titles available. Plus they are all listed on the web and available for reserve. Go to the local branch, check them out, watch them for a week, copy them (with DVD decrypter or DVDshrink) if you choose to, bring them back, repeat.
All legal, all free, all under-the-radar of the corporate monkeys and their lawyers.
The purpose of the HR department is to come up with bizarre and absurd reasons why mid-level supervisors can't get the human resources that they need to keep their division profitable.
All the other functions of a 'human resources' department could be done by computer or out-sourced to some distant third-world country. So the alleged humans in the HR department need to constantly come up with reasons to justify their salaries. So they specialize in coming up with weird and irrelevant reasons to prevent YOU from being hired.
My last job interview had a 22-year old ask me to explain a job termination that happened to me before she (always a she) was even born! How do you answer something like that?
When Salon.com paywalled they didn't deny free access to the entire website. They just make it quite annoying to access for the people who didn't pay. Salon.com is still around and occasionally interesting. Especially when they can get Camille Paglia to do a column. They seem to have a lot of people on staff that do little more than come up with new ways to annoy their web site viewers. But they were the first people to tell me about MP3 files twelve years ago, so I'm eternally grateful to them for that.
The worst paywalls are the video clips that make you wait through a 30 second to one minute commercial before they will show what you clicked on. I just jump out of these situations because I hate commercials and I have seen too many already in my life.
The ugliest website that I have ever seen is Asia Times (www.atimes.com). Good content is buried somewhere deep in all this mess. Ebay is getting to be quite ugly too, as is Yahoo!. I'm switching my main e-main address to Google mail so that I don't have to wait for all the schmaltz useless photos on Yahoo that clog my dial-up bandwidth.
Charging a pound a day to read news is ill-advised. It will transform this man's newspaper from being the anchor media of the community to being just another website for the rich and their wack-job worshipers.
Newspapers a hundred-years ago were the voice and rallying point of the many diverse communities in the USA and the voice of the middle class in Europe. There were many and each had strong and opposing editorial positions. After World War II the newspapers consolidated into a few major corporations and greatly softened their strident editorial positions. They started to become focused on local advertising, legal announcements, and providing a printed 'voice of record' for centralized government and corporate positions and viewpoints.
In the 1980s multiple papers and editions in cities disappeared. Most major cities had only one daily and one 'alternative' weekly for young adults. At the millennium, the function of providing news and advertisements started being done by the web and newspapers began to be perceived as irrelevant. A large number of people born after WWII hated their local established daily because the ultra-conservative editorial board would always take the wrong position on every single issue, year after year. Other middle-of-the-road young people found little in the daily that was useful to their lives. One by one, they stopped buying the local paper as the years went by. Editions of major city papers, NY Times, Washington Post, started being published in minor cities.
The wealthy loved the daily paper. They were deluded into believing that the conservative editorial positions were a manifestation of the political views of the people and not a paid reflection of their own perspectives. They poured millions into the dailys, year after year.
Then a few years ago, a tipping point happened. The amount of money coming in didn't pay the costs of the dailys. The papers went 'thin', losing 50-70% of their daily newsprint and concentrated on food ads, kittens-stuck-in-trees human-interest stories, obituaries, and comics. The young get the functions of a daily paper from the web and cable TV. The old feel just lost and the middle class/aged just don't care as long as the SUV still runs.
The global newspaper kings should make their news outlets and web sites free. The sources that they use to get the information are more interested in getting their positions out to the international public than they are interested in selling stories to newspapers. They will use focused web sites. Centralized 'journalism' will wither and just become a forgotten cultural characteristic of the 20th century. Murdock appears to be too old, too isolated, and too rich to understand this.
No two languages can be more different than English and Lao. Mastering both is serious intellectual accomplishment.
But here in Beaverton Oregon it is the standard practice of companies that operate in the vast Southeast Asian community to pay employees fifty cents an hour more if they are fluent in both English and one or more Southeast Asian languages.
Yes, I do know how much more money you can make by being bilingual in radically different languages. You make 50 cents an hour more than the people who only know English.
I'm not bitter, I'm realistic about the value of spending 10000 hours mastering a difficult language.
The translating computer you have? Built by smart people who didn't waste their lives wasted and in bed.
Every great scientific advance is made by smart people who waste their lives getting high and fucking. Smarter people use these technological advances in order to live as well as 'the smart people' and enjoy getting high and fucking while the 'smart people' toil in the lab. Welcome to real world.
Actually, computers are rather bad at language translation.
I believe that you mean that software is rather bad at translation, computers are good at memorization. Using computers to handle the memorization frees us to explore software and human intelligence to do translation without the burden of memorization.
I use a five-point scale for machine translation. Level one is individual words and kanji. Level two is phrases and sentences. Level three is paragraphs and paragraph clusters, like this message. Level four is newspaper level and films. Level five is literature and diplomacy. Each level would require (I assume) one to two orders of magnitude of computing power to attain from the previous level. Current machine language translation that is freely available (from web sources like Google and www.systranet.com) operates current between levels one and two. Good software could bring us to between levels four and five with existing microprocessors.
Language translation progress can be likened to Columbus' being halfway across the Atlantic. We know exactly what we're looking for, and we firmly believe that it is obtainable and profitable. We just don't know exactly where we are or how long it will take to get where we want to be.
Transferring memorization to machines would free human intelligence to make vast advances in linguistics. By analyzing translation loops (going from a primary language to a second language and then translating the results back to the primary language) we can find why some software algorithms work in some languages and others fail. Why would Chomsky-based software translate "out of sight, out of mind" to "invisible idiot" and Sapir-based algorithms return nonsense when looping from English to Mandarin but not when looping from Mardarin to Mayan?
This entire field is wide open. Linguistic software is the 'killer ap' of the 21st century in the way that 'office equipment' transformation (spreadsheets, word processors, etc...) were the great money maker of the first generation of computers. ..but no practical computer can replace the wonder that is the human mind when it comes to language-related tasks.
No disrespect or sarcasm intended, but IMHO that statement is like saying that no calculator can bring the mental satisfaction that comes from successfully multiplying two ten-digit numbers in Middle school arithmetic class.
Everyone here seems to be missing the point. We have advanced powerful cheap technology that is infinitely better than a human brain at memorizing things like character symbols and vocabulary.
Don't memorize anything. Let the computer do the translating. That's what computers are good for. Humans are not good at this. That is why it is so hard. So do the obvious and let the computer do the translation.
Got a little camera like the one in cell phones? Plug that camera into your hand held PC/internet/MP3player/telephone iTurd whatever. Point the camera at the kanji that you want translated. Press the button on the iTurd. Glance briefly at the little iTurd screen. Trust the iTurd ap program to have done an optical kanji recognition on the characters that it just imaged and is giving you the correct English/Finnish/Thai//Wolof/Whatever translation.
Tech people seem to have this obsession with doing things that prove to themselves and other people that they are 'smart'. They believe that just because they have mastered technology, then they are under some obligation to themselves or their class that they must master all things that are difficult in order to recertify their 'smart person' credential. So they feel the need to memorize 5000 kanji, or play a difficult Bach invention on an aucostic piano, or run a marathon, or to get themselves killed attempting to 'win the hearts and minds' of people who have neither.
Don't waste your time, and abandon your hang-ups about your smartness. Let the $200 computer master 50000 kanji, let your $50 MIDI synth play Bach, let your car take 20 miles in comfort, and let the expendable fools go to the other side of the world and get killed.
Your 'smartness' is certified by your unwillingness to do these things yourself, the hard and dumb way.
I studied Japanese. It was about the time that personal computers were just beginning in 1979. The first time that I saw an optical-character wand read digits (in 1981) I knew that there was NO FUCKING WAY that I was going to spend 10000 hours committing 10000 kanji to memory. That's what computers do. I'm a better person because I didn't do it.
Please spare me the horseshit about how the discipline of memorizing and learning makes a better person and builds character. Look at those assholes who spend their life memorizing the Quran, and then go blow up a bus or day-care center.
Memorization lost its validity the day that computers started selling for $50. And that was a long time ago. So what that I can't pick up a Japanese newspaper and know what it says just by looking at it! I've got a $100 1GigaHertz 400MegaFlop microPC in my hand that does it just as well.
And I spent the 10000 hours smoking weed and fucking beautiful girls instead of memorizing kanji. Life is a series of difficult choices and hard trade-offs.
"An 11k app is not going to make me, or my computer, say 'Good Bye World'"
It is if your computer is a 38-cent Atmel AVR tiny 10, which only has enough space for 512 12-bit instruction words. This chip is about half the size of a sunflower seed, but is faster, and, in several ways, more powerful, than the original $5000 IBM PC from 1981.
Get away from the idea of Gigahertz desktops and $1000 laptops and join the real computer revolution!
For me, if it costs more that $5, it's not a computer that I take seriously. It's just a 20th-century digital processing appliance.
You aren't going to hell for this, and I'm not going to stand for the other Slashdaughters giving you grief for being the first to ask the right questions.
Your point is the most straightforward one that must always be asked about any new technology - Is it going to make life better or worse? For who?
It is ironic that we (the world's technologists - which is us, fellow Slashdaughters) are creating machines that will eventually be able to replace humans in the workplace at the same time that the world's population is entering the vertical section of a 'hockey stick' growth curve.
Your point is dead-on: there are billions of people who can do the work better than any current robot can and they are far smarter than any robot will ever be for another century if not longer. And yes, they are cheap, self-maintaining, and self-reproducing. And if you control their life-support and religious systems, they don't give you any trouble. And give them the right drugs, they will be happy in their place. There are always going to be 10% that won't accept their condition, but that is true in any social conditions, cultures, and historical eras. Ours is no different.
The population explosion in the third world is a direct result of the technological innovations that resulted from cheap energy sources that are characteristic of the modern era that began in the late 19th century. If, and there is a lot of disagreement on this subject among people who do know what they are talking about, the cheap energy era ends, then the population will decrease. From war and disease and psychological trauma, people will stop having children as they did in the 20th century. It is possible, but not assured, that the rate of technological innovation could fall as a result of population decline and the end of the cheap energy era. As the 20th century was a positive feedback loop of technological and population growth, so might the 21st century be a negative feedback loop of technological reversals that can't be halted despite the best efforts of the Slashdaughters. Nothing is inevitable.
But, robots are a long way from taking away skilled manufacturing jobs. And population growth levels off when third-world societies enter the middle class.
So we should presently use robots to do the jobs that have the most economic return or do the most to reduce the human cost. Stuff like clearing mine fields, picking strawberries, and manufacturing/cleaning in toxic environments. And make decent jobs for the people that are here presently.
Be flexible and keep an open mind. Listen closely to what different people are saying and try to do no harm. You'll be cool.
Generally, plastic is not electrically conductive. Which makes it good for mounting electronics. But it is also not heat conductive. Which makes it near worthless for mounting.
A non-electric conductive, but heat conductive material would be very useful. Especially if it is CHEAP. It could be used to distribute heat in buildings and not just on circuit boards.
" models their 'musical personalities' to create new recordings,"
Anyone who can get $10.7 MILLION dollars on the basis of such a flimsy claim deserves respect for their bullshitting ability.
If you want to know what Lady Gaga (who the fuck is she?) would sound like if she were 'musically repersonalized' by Space Captain James T. Hendrix, then take her recordings (I assume that she is some kind of recording 'artist' since she has been on the cover of Rolling Stone) and run them through a flanger, phase shifter, distortion unit, and wah-wah pedal. Play it really loud, take a shit load of mescaline, and -voila- you have Hendrix playing in the style of 'Lady Gaga' (who is this creature and why is she in the entertainment media?).
In all seriousness,... It's just music. It's not a cure for cancer. It's not a car that get 100 miles to a gallon of gas. It's not a cure for AIDS or weaponized smallpox.
It's just...fucking...music. Stop pretending that it's so serious. And don't give them any more money. Jeez, 10 million fucking dollars for this horseshit!!!
I quite agree. So much of psychology is a matter of circular definitions; which quickly degenerates into psycho-babble that only accentuates the tenuous utility of the psychologists.
A person is depressed because they spend too much time on their computer; depression is related to computer use; computer use can cause depression; depression is a mental condition that is characterized by the behavior and social interactivity of people who enjoy computer usage; and so on.... Doesn't mean shit, but provides a paycheck to 'professionals' who can't understand why someone else would find C++ fascinating.
Ignore these people and you'll feel less depressed.
In their defense, personal computer programming is much more complicated than it was in 1982. The machines and the hardware is several orders of magnitude faster and denser than it was then. The basics do change.
Don't forget that the primary reason for the existence of Apple Inc is to facilitate the orderly and systematic transfer of money from the bank accounts of bored yuppies to the account of Steven Jobs. The toys and the technology is a means to an end. Home computers started in the 1970s as toys for hackers, became business office tools in the 1980s, design and educational tools in the 1990s, and home-entertainment/communications centers in the 2000s. (..and destroying the previous industry giants in each field in the process)
People wishing to provide for their kids the experiences that they had programming 8-bit home computers should get into Aurdino and other small-scale microcontroller-based systems. The chips are cheap. The programmers are low-cost. The assemblers and compilers are free and open-sourced. Sensors are cheap, as are LCD-character displays. Graphics LCD modules are getting cheaper, but are a long way from being cheap. Gigabyte storage of data is dirt-cheap as SD cards, but they can have a difficult learning curve. In this field, projects are often shared. Tinkering and development is encouraged. Questions, even beginning questions, get answered.
When PCs and Macs get locked down in place, the microcontroller communities sprout up like mushrooms. This is the place for tinkerers. But, please, don't let the people at Microsoft and Apple know!
But "28 Days Later" wasn't that good.
If there's a 'must-see' then we don't know about it until it's out of the first-run theaters. How else are you going to know that the film is good? People that go to first run movies, spend $10 each for tickets, $25 for babysitter, $5 for popcorn, and $4 for popcorn aren't going to tell you that the movie wasn't anything but good. And the second week people are always going to say the film is good to prove that they can wait for quality.
No, you gotta wait until the movie reaches the second-run $3 theaters. If it isn't any good then it won't get to these theaters. The studio will blitz the opening night with deceptive ads for a turkey and then go straight to DVD.
If it's a real 'must-see' then just watch the previews/trailers until you know the whole movie. Your average Hollywood movie can have its entire look/feel/plot experienced in a three minute preview (Spiderman III, Superman Ten, anyone?).
Nah, If it's worth seeing, then it's worth waiting for the DVD. And if it's really good, then it will make it to the library shelf where it will be free for a week or more.
And if it's great, then it's timeless quality. So why not wait a year or two to see it? What difference does it make? Now's the time to go to the library and check out for free all the excellent movies that you decided not to see because you didn't want to spend $10 on an independent or foreign film when it was in the theaters.
Myself, I always save the best for last. Maybe this week I'll watch this movie called 'Star Wars' that I've been hearing people rave about for so long.
A giant sun tower or two in Arizona is an interesting idea. But it makes more sense to build a huge lightning capacitor.
There's this place in Arizona where lightning strikes are common and happen nearly every night. Something in the atmosphere, the heat, and humidity.
So why not dig a huge hole in the ground, fill it with aluminum foil and electrolytic, then quickly and carefully build a huge lightning rod. The lightning will constantly arc to the giant million farad capacitor in the ground. It gets recharged up every night and the 'supercap' powers a small city or suburb.
Electricity directly from the sky to your PC!