Your arguments would hit home a little bit more if you actually listed examples of some actual noted futurologists instead of noted science fiction authors.
Asimov is the only one of those that worked in the field and he certainly wasn't ever attempting to pass off his works of fiction as predictions of anything.
I'm often amazed how many people on here think a field devoted to "guessing what's technically feasible" is a hoax and then they go on to quote the "flying cars" example all the while ignoring the fact that building a flying car is pretty freaking easy with todays technology.
"This is gonna be interesting. Can you imagine Intel touting Cell's no-out-of-order, no-cache architecture? They'd have to disavow the last twenty years marketing efforts. The mind reels..."
Yes because "Intel inside" is clearly not going to work anymore!
They are going to have to change it to Intel's Inside
I think the point of turning gasoline into hydrogen would be that it would finally solve one of the biggest problems with fuel cell acceptance. The problem of where do you "fill up".
If your car has a method of efficently turning gasoline into hydrogen then a huge distrubition problem is solved. Fuel cell cars could become accepted much more easily because you wouldn't have to worry about being out of fuel. Yet in a large majority of the cases you'd never actually need to fill up at the gas station assuming you recharged your fuel cells overnight.
Of course that's assuming this is really efficent instead of just more efficent than an already unefficent process.
Maybe a prospective employer would mark you down for only paying minimums but if you think credit card companies mark your rating down for just paying the minimum you are nuts. In fact routinely paying the minimum and never fully paying off the debt is one of the best ways to get extremely good credit.
That's just common sense. The minimum is the interest which is where the acutal profit is.
You are mistaken in assuming I'm describing the situation I'm currently in. Not all of us are extreme extroverts who want to get along with 39 other people in such an intimate fashion. You talk about what you think is good in a guild but I don't agree. A guild that you describe is no more worth playing with than the kind of burnout guilds you seem to scorn.
I simply do not want to play with 39 other people no matter how "cool" they are.
In the end the one single truth is that a console is made or broken on the games released for it. This is what really irks me. I can't get rid of Windows because of games. It's likely I'll have to buy a PS3 for the same reason.
Xbox 360 is STILL ignoring entire genres of games even though that was the entire reason for the first one's failure. The Wii excites me and I'd gleefully buy it..except if it's anything like the gamecube it will probably have all of 2 or 3 titles that I actually want to play.
So basically unless Nintendo stops going for a niche market the PS3 is sure to do well simply based on the fact that it has no competition at all for certain very popular genres.
It's very possible that all 3 consoles are going to end up controlling their own niches this generation. A fairly disgusting fact for those of us who are interested in the niche it seems the stupidly expensive PS3 will control.
"That's when the fun starts... 20/40 man raids are the fun part..."
Yes because I want to be in voice chat with 40 guys who I probably don't even like while listening to some power tripping guild leader try to micromanage everyone for 6 hours every night.
Your statement vaguely reminds me of college days where several friends would attempt to insist to me that going to a party and getting drunk off my ass followed by puking and waking up with a huge hangover was "the fun part".
"No, the quests don't get more varied. That's why the jab is that there are only three (or so) types of quests. It's literally true."
Oh please that is a flat out lie.
Rescue a knight from a dungeon. Then you walk through the alliance capital with said knight while every soldier you see salutes him. Several cutscenes happen. A certain political figure is revealed to be something very bad and a huge fight ensues after which you are charged to seek out said very bad person and kill them.
There are lots of examples like this. The quests in WoW are very varied. The problem is you finish them and WoW's end game doesn't really even have anymore quests it's just raid dungeon running over and over.
You make that sound like some sort of stand you are taking against evil. You also act like people who pay these subscriptions are making some sort of mistake.
What if they stop charging a monthly fee and start charging $150 up front flat fee? Is that going to somehow make it better for you even though numerically it's probably more?
I've got a lot of bad things to say about WoW but so far it's the only MMO to every actually deliver fifteen bucks worth of content every month.
"For example, look at some of the people who try to defend a religious or non-evolutionary perspective. Or try to defend laws restricting minor (as in children) access to anything, no matter how psychologically, emotionally, or sometimes even physically damaging."
That's an example of group think/moderation working. It doesn't really matter how good the comment is. If it's defending religion or promoting some stupid study where corelation has been mistaken for causation it's supposed to get modded down. I can only speak for myself of course but I firmly hope all moderators keep the noise level down on such posts.
The problem with DRM isn't what they are trying to accomplish with it.
The problem is quite simply that no matter what scheme they come up with at some point they have to actually let you watch/listen. People talk about encrypted media paths and what not. Wherever you put an encrypted media path in it has to end somewhere.
Wherever that path ends someone has the capability to take it's output and turn it into a very pristine digital copy. Once that one person makes a copy and uploads it to the net everyone can get it easily with very little effort.
This is fact. An unchangeable reality. The only possible outcome is going to be an eventual massive shift in how we view the mere concept of compensation for copyrighted material.
People missed one important point. They tested -one- piece of equipment to see if it was rated for the temperatures the ship might go into and they were told to stop testing for such a thing.
That means they added several things all of which could fail in intended temperatures. It could be stuff that fails in extreme heat or humidity too.
All in all though I found it kind of amusing that the guy making the video thinks people will find it shocking. Personally I expect govt contractors do this kind of stuff five times before they even get to breakfast every day.
"Finally, one more thing -- ban cell phones from mealtimes, and from family time."
Yes because it's important to make sure kids know that people they only share blood with are more important than people they chose to be friends with all on their own.
Scheduling family time is one thing but forcing them to do it against their will is just stupid.
Avoiding war has nothing to do with pacifism. Pacifisim is about not using violence for anything. It is a concious effort to try and deny that entropy exists.
I think DirectX sucks for a variety of reasons but the truth of the matter is there are no real video card features DX9 doesn't currently implement. Neither Nvidia or ATI have yet to release a card with the new feature sets in DX10.
Even then it makes me wonder what the point is. When games like WoW get all the headlines using technology that barely require DX8. Maybe if you are into FPS games this will matter but for everyone else the featureset you are calling dated far outpaced the software that runs on it years ago.
I'm pretty skeptical of how OpenGL will survive in games now that Carmack has sold out. It's a bleak future for those of us gamers who want to someday drop Windows and use a real OS.
I'm a little suprised that nobody here is talking about this. AJAX is basically the concept of using proper client/server methods for web pages.
The thing that's always held this concept back though is security. You can't just download clients from web pages because running code is dangerous. Javascript attempts to somewhat solves this problem but hasn't it always been widely regarded as having some security flaws in it's security policies?
Why is everyone all the sudden ignoring this fact and going whole hog on javascript to create these dynamic web pages? It worries me because I think the reason it's happening is that everyone really needed dynamic web pages to compete and they could no longer wait for something a bit more secure so now we may be stuck with a dangerous precedent.
"While the first amendment is clear and solid, what would happen if it turned out that laws prohibiting yelling "fire" in a theatre were unconstitutional?"
Laws that prohibit yelling "fire" in a theatre ARE unconstitutional.
That's the whole freaking problem in the first place. Some people seem to think it's ok to pass "obvious" laws that are unconstitutional simply because they are obviously useful laws.
I've got a news flash for you though. We already have a method for the government to get around these little niggling problems. They simply have to ammend the constitution.
Obviously yelling "fire" in a crowded place when there is no actual fire is an attempt to cause panic and should probably be illegal. If they want to make that illegal they need to come up with a proper ammendment and get it past the much larger majority required to make an ammendment.
A lot of people will argue that such an ammendment is dangerous and that it might cause a loophole in the first or blah blah. I tell you though that no matter what it's a lot LESS dangerous than this wholesale blatant ignoring of the constitution that has been going on virtually since the country has been founded.
Ok I'm looking at the claims and basically it's extremely clear from the claims that they've tried to patent the concept of a pressure sensitive analog button that has visual feedback.
It's a good idea no doubt. I can think of tons of applications for such a button. Although I can't remember any game controller ever having a pressure sensitive analog button. It's very specific that it has to be a depressible surface so they can't claim analog sticks count.
The problem though still is that it's freaking obvious. Pressure sensitive analog buttons were not new when this patent was filed.
All they did was take an electronic component and patent different kinds of devices you could put said component on. It's the equivalent of someone in the past trying to patent an "analog rotational circuit connected to a stick in a handheld device containing electroncis" before consoles came out and then suing over the joystick.
It's bogus because the idea of using an analog stick is pretty obvious and the idea of putting it in a handheld device is even more obvious. The only thing worth patent in a joystick is the original patent on the analog sensor itself. Yet in today's world it would be perfectly normal that putting a button on the stick connected to the analog rotational sensor in a handheld device is a patent.
All of this talk about "obvious" brings up another point. Even if it were unobvious I'd still call this a bogus patent. Our patent system is full of crap that probably wasn't obvious but still didn't deserve a patent.
Take for instance whatever patent Apple has that covers the wheel (circular touch sensor blah blah) on an iPod. That was indeed UNobvious but does it deserve a patent? Was the concept really all that hard to develop? Personally I can't see the reason for it. Patents are supposed to exist to provide incentive to scientific advancement. They don't exist to make sure everytime an engineer has a moderately good design idea that his employer can have a sudden monopoly on said idea.
I'm on the fence about it myself. I see it as a good idea in some ways and a waste in others.
Classically the reason these super poor regions are so poor is either lack of resources or people with power come in and exploit the resources. Exceptions exist I'm sure but this is the gist of it as far as I understand.
The best way to help them is help them create a situation in which it becomes worthwhile to invest money in infastructure in said countries. Increasing education levels is a good way to do this.
The reason I'm skeptical though is the question of who gets the education? If India buys a million of these laptops will they use them all over the country or just to educate a select group of people?
What about countries with religous/racial bigotry? Perhaps they'll buy many of the laptops and give them only to people who support the states vision.
I'm not as educated on this as I should be but hasn't this been a problem with food as well? Often when we give out charity in this way some individual in power in these underdeveloping countries will turn around and use it in some twisted way to gain yet more power while doing little to improve the overall good of the country.
The laptops are not a waste I just worry that they will never really be used properly.
I'm not going to knock it but your statement is very far from the truth. Determining the "most successful" long term storage method invented would require waiting till the year 5xxx something to see if something we've currently invented beats cuneiform. Even then it's pretty hard to prove one way or another since a lot of the cuneiform we have today is being carefuly taken care of to prolong it's lifetime I'd suspect (though I have no confirmation of that part).
You might want to read the article yourself instead of just skimming it.
At no point does the article actually say what happened to the freaking tree. It's implied that a few branches are broken but who knows what slant the author is pushing. Maybe excessive damage was done maybe not. Also you seem to be implying the kids were damaging a tree someone owned when the article clearly states that the tree is on public wooded lands. So perhaps you should go ahead and take some of your own medicine there.
Slashdot Mirror
Asimov, Heinlein, RODDENBERRY??
Your arguments would hit home a little bit more if you actually listed examples of some actual noted futurologists instead of noted science fiction authors.
Asimov is the only one of those that worked in the field and he certainly wasn't ever attempting to pass off his works of fiction as predictions of anything.
I'm often amazed how many people on here think a field devoted to "guessing what's technically feasible" is a hoax and then they go on to quote the "flying cars" example all the while ignoring the fact that building a flying car is pretty freaking easy with todays technology.
"This is gonna be interesting. Can you imagine Intel touting Cell's no-out-of-order, no-cache architecture? They'd have to disavow the last twenty years marketing efforts. The mind reels..."
Yes because "Intel inside" is clearly not going to work anymore!
They are going to have to change it to Intel's Inside
I think the point of turning gasoline into hydrogen would be that it would finally solve one of the biggest problems with fuel cell acceptance. The problem of where do you "fill up".
If your car has a method of efficently turning gasoline into hydrogen then a huge distrubition problem is solved. Fuel cell cars could become accepted much more easily because you wouldn't have to worry about being out of fuel. Yet in a large majority of the cases you'd never actually need to fill up at the gas station assuming you recharged your fuel cells overnight.
Of course that's assuming this is really efficent instead of just more efficent than an already unefficent process.
Maybe a prospective employer would mark you down for only paying minimums but if you think credit card companies mark your rating down for just paying the minimum you are nuts. In fact routinely paying the minimum and never fully paying off the debt is one of the best ways to get extremely good credit.
That's just common sense. The minimum is the interest which is where the acutal profit is.
You are mistaken in assuming I'm describing the situation I'm currently in. Not all of us are extreme extroverts who want to get along with 39 other people in such an intimate fashion. You talk about what you think is good in a guild but I don't agree. A guild that you describe is no more worth playing with than the kind of burnout guilds you seem to scorn.
I simply do not want to play with 39 other people no matter how "cool" they are.
In the end the one single truth is that a console is made or broken on the games released for it. This is what really irks me. I can't get rid of Windows because of games. It's likely I'll have to buy a PS3 for the same reason.
Xbox 360 is STILL ignoring entire genres of games even though that was the entire reason for the first one's failure. The Wii excites me and I'd gleefully buy it..except if it's anything like the gamecube it will probably have all of 2 or 3 titles that I actually want to play.
So basically unless Nintendo stops going for a niche market the PS3 is sure to do well simply based on the fact that it has no competition at all for certain very popular genres.
It's very possible that all 3 consoles are going to end up controlling their own niches this generation. A fairly disgusting fact for those of us who are interested in the niche it seems the stupidly expensive PS3 will control.
"That's when the fun starts... 20/40 man raids are the fun part..."
Yes because I want to be in voice chat with 40 guys who I probably don't even like while listening to some power tripping guild leader try to micromanage everyone for 6 hours every night.
Your statement vaguely reminds me of college days where several friends would attempt to insist to me that going to a party and getting drunk off my ass followed by puking and waking up with a huge hangover was "the fun part".
"No, the quests don't get more varied. That's why the jab is that there are only three (or so) types of quests. It's literally true."
Oh please that is a flat out lie.
Rescue a knight from a dungeon. Then you walk through the alliance capital with said knight while every soldier you see salutes him. Several cutscenes happen. A certain political figure is revealed to be something very bad and a huge fight ensues after which you are charged to seek out said very bad person and kill them.
There are lots of examples like this. The quests in WoW are very varied. The problem is you finish them and WoW's end game doesn't really even have anymore quests it's just raid dungeon running over and over.
"I will never pay a monthly fee for a game."
You make that sound like some sort of stand you are taking against evil. You also act like people who pay these subscriptions are making some sort of mistake.
What if they stop charging a monthly fee and start charging $150 up front flat fee? Is that going to somehow make it better for you even though numerically it's probably more?
I've got a lot of bad things to say about WoW but so far it's the only MMO to every actually deliver fifteen bucks worth of content every month.
"For example, look at some of the people who try to defend a religious or non-evolutionary perspective. Or try to defend laws restricting minor (as in children) access to anything, no matter how psychologically, emotionally, or sometimes even physically damaging."
That's an example of group think/moderation working. It doesn't really matter how good the comment is. If it's defending religion or promoting some stupid study where corelation has been mistaken for causation it's supposed to get modded down. I can only speak for myself of course but I firmly hope all moderators keep the noise level down on such posts.
The problem with DRM isn't what they are trying to accomplish with it.
The problem is quite simply that no matter what scheme they come up with at some point they have to actually let you watch/listen. People talk about encrypted media paths and what not. Wherever you put an encrypted media path in it has to end somewhere.
Wherever that path ends someone has the capability to take it's output and turn it into a very pristine digital copy. Once that one person makes a copy and uploads it to the net everyone can get it easily with very little effort.
This is fact. An unchangeable reality. The only possible outcome is going to be an eventual massive shift in how we view the mere concept of compensation for copyrighted material.
"3. Informal. to suppose or surmise; guess: I expect that you are tired from the trip."
Expect is a proper use of the word in this case.
People missed one important point. They tested -one- piece of equipment to see if it was rated for the temperatures the ship might go into and they were told to stop testing for such a thing.
That means they added several things all of which could fail in intended temperatures. It could be stuff that fails in extreme heat or humidity too.
All in all though I found it kind of amusing that the guy making the video thinks people will find it shocking. Personally I expect govt contractors do this kind of stuff five times before they even get to breakfast every day.
"Finally, one more thing -- ban cell phones from mealtimes, and from family time."
Yes because it's important to make sure kids know that people they only share blood with are more important than people they chose to be friends with all on their own.
Scheduling family time is one thing but forcing them to do it against their will is just stupid.
Avoiding war has nothing to do with pacifism. Pacifisim is about not using violence for anything. It is a concious effort to try and deny that entropy exists.
All the other comments aside as I understand it the device uses an explosive charge to shove a piece of metal into the saw blade to stop it cold.
This seems like a pretty stupid way to build a safety device (using explosives and ruining the blade).
Why not just have something shove the blade backwards and downwards into the table at high speed while using a bit more traditional breaking?
I think DirectX sucks for a variety of reasons but the truth of the matter is there are no real video card features DX9 doesn't currently implement. Neither Nvidia or ATI have yet to release a card with the new feature sets in DX10.
Even then it makes me wonder what the point is. When games like WoW get all the headlines using technology that barely require DX8. Maybe if you are into FPS games this will matter but for everyone else the featureset you are calling dated far outpaced the software that runs on it years ago.
I'm pretty skeptical of how OpenGL will survive in games now that Carmack has sold out. It's a bleak future for those of us gamers who want to someday drop Windows and use a real OS.
I'm a little suprised that nobody here is talking about this. AJAX is basically the concept of using proper client/server methods for web pages.
The thing that's always held this concept back though is security. You can't just download clients from web pages because running code is dangerous. Javascript attempts to somewhat solves this problem but hasn't it always been widely regarded as having some security flaws in it's security policies?
Why is everyone all the sudden ignoring this fact and going whole hog on javascript to create these dynamic web pages? It worries me because I think the reason it's happening is that everyone really needed dynamic web pages to compete and they could no longer wait for something a bit more secure so now we may be stuck with a dangerous precedent.
"While the first amendment is clear and solid, what would happen if it turned out that laws prohibiting yelling "fire" in a theatre were unconstitutional?"
Laws that prohibit yelling "fire" in a theatre ARE unconstitutional.
That's the whole freaking problem in the first place. Some people seem to think it's ok to pass "obvious" laws that are unconstitutional simply because they are obviously useful laws.
I've got a news flash for you though. We already have a method for the government to get around these little niggling problems. They simply have to ammend the constitution.
Obviously yelling "fire" in a crowded place when there is no actual fire is an attempt to cause panic and should probably be illegal. If they want to make that illegal they need to come up with a proper ammendment and get it past the much larger majority required to make an ammendment.
A lot of people will argue that such an ammendment is dangerous and that it might cause a loophole in the first or blah blah. I tell you though that no matter what it's a lot LESS dangerous than this wholesale blatant ignoring of the constitution that has been going on virtually since the country has been founded.
Ok I'm looking at the claims and basically it's extremely clear from the claims that they've tried to patent the concept of a pressure sensitive analog button that has visual feedback.
It's a good idea no doubt. I can think of tons of applications for such a button. Although I can't remember any game controller ever having a pressure sensitive analog button. It's very specific that it has to be a depressible surface so they can't claim analog sticks count.
The problem though still is that it's freaking obvious. Pressure sensitive analog buttons were not new when this patent was filed.
All they did was take an electronic component and patent different kinds of devices you could put said component on. It's the equivalent of someone in the past trying to patent an "analog rotational circuit connected to a stick in a handheld device containing electroncis" before consoles came out and then suing over the joystick.
It's bogus because the idea of using an analog stick is pretty obvious and the idea of putting it in a handheld device is even more obvious. The only thing worth patent in a joystick is the original patent on the analog sensor itself. Yet in today's world it would be perfectly normal that putting a button on the stick connected to the analog rotational sensor in a handheld device is a patent.
All of this talk about "obvious" brings up another point. Even if it were unobvious I'd still call this a bogus patent. Our patent system is full of crap that probably wasn't obvious but still didn't deserve a patent.
Take for instance whatever patent Apple has that covers the wheel (circular touch sensor blah blah) on an iPod. That was indeed UNobvious but does it deserve a patent? Was the concept really all that hard to develop? Personally I can't see the reason for it. Patents are supposed to exist to provide incentive to scientific advancement. They don't exist to make sure everytime an engineer has a moderately good design idea that his employer can have a sudden monopoly on said idea.
I'm on the fence about it myself. I see it as a good idea in some ways and a waste in others.
Classically the reason these super poor regions are so poor is either lack of resources or people with power come in and exploit the resources. Exceptions exist I'm sure but this is the gist of it as far as I understand.
The best way to help them is help them create a situation in which it becomes worthwhile to invest money in infastructure in said countries. Increasing education levels is a good way to do this.
The reason I'm skeptical though is the question of who gets the education? If India buys a million of these laptops will they use them all over the country or just to educate a select group of people?
What about countries with religous/racial bigotry? Perhaps they'll buy many of the laptops and give them only to people who support the states vision.
I'm not as educated on this as I should be but hasn't this been a problem with food as well? Often when we give out charity in this way some individual in power in these underdeveloping countries will turn around and use it in some twisted way to gain yet more power while doing little to improve the overall good of the country.
The laptops are not a waste I just worry that they will never really be used properly.
The best part about this post is that it's modded "Informative".
I'm not going to knock it but your statement is very far from the truth. Determining the "most successful" long term storage method invented would require waiting till the year 5xxx something to see if something we've currently invented beats cuneiform. Even then it's pretty hard to prove one way or another since a lot of the cuneiform we have today is being carefuly taken care of to prolong it's lifetime I'd suspect (though I have no confirmation of that part).
You might want to read the article yourself instead of just skimming it.
At no point does the article actually say what happened to the freaking tree. It's implied that a few branches are broken but who knows what slant the author is pushing. Maybe excessive damage was done maybe not. Also you seem to be implying the kids were damaging a tree someone owned when the article clearly states that the tree is on public wooded lands. So perhaps you should go ahead and take some of your own medicine there.
"there are many countries that are more democratic and value the rights of the individual more"
It sounds good until you look around and realize the US is just putting presure on said countries to follow suit.
Or to sum it all up: Welcome to the Global Hegemony of America (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony)