Some reasonably visible changes since I was born - not all invented since then, but all rolling out in a major way:
Transistors were still replacing tubes when I was a kid Integrated circuits replacing discrete electronics, semiconductor RAM/DRAM, microprocessor Plastic replacing many glass containers
Hand held calculators, Personal computers, handheld computers (Newton, Blackberry, iPhone) Modems, cable data services, wireless data services, BBS systems, Internet / World Wide Web CB radio, pagers, Cellphone, texting, internet phone, video conferencing, web conferencing digital cameras, digital video Medical electronics - heart monitors, sonogram, Magnetic Resonance Imaging analog electronic watches, digital watches, LED and LCD display watches, other gadgets using LCD displays GPS
Most of the spread of cable TV, digital cable, digital TV broadcasts, internet video/TV Most of the change from B&W to color TVs; big screen projection TVs, flat plasma and LCD TVs, tiny portable TVs Videotape and DVDs, now BluRay disc, Sony walkman, MP3 players, CD audio, floppy disc, hard disk drive, CD ROM, DVD ROM, BD ROM Video games and PC games, handheld game units, DnD / roleplaying games
Jets replacing prop planes for commercial travel, private jets, cheap/mass air travel Further decline of the train and interstate trucking. Interstate Highway system development/build-out Cargo container shipping Sputnik, communication satellites, spy satellites, earth-observing satellites Man in space, Man on the moon, Space Shuttle, Skylab, International Space Station
teflon pans, Microwave ovens, Dish Washers all became common in the home (all invented earlier)
White dental fillings mostly replacing silver and gold. Near painless dentistry - getting a filling was horrible as a child! Workable implants. heart pacemakers, stints, numerous chemotherapy advances
Years ago, when I (and others) pushed the idea that personal information generated as one goes about one's life should be considered private property, this is the sort of thing I expected. We should have always owned the copyright on all information generated by living our lives - "I am the author of my own history", and derivative works like IBM's should be a copyright violation.
Now it's too late - the corporations own your personal life log, and they can do whatever they want with it so long as they don't tell anyone else "personally identifying information". They can even, in some cases, deny you the right to see what they know about you, and they certainly have no requirement to actively inform you about what they're tracking about you.
The relationship should have always been the other way around - "I'm letting you use THIS specific information you gather about me for THESE purposes - anything else you want to collect or do with data I've allowed you to collect, you have to ask, same as with any other private property." Someday, some corporation will overstep somehow, and people will get angry enough to force some change.
"During the past two years, estimates of dismantling costs have soared by more than $4.6 billion because rising energy and labor costs, while the investment funds that are supposed to pay for shutting plants down have lost $4.4 billion in the battered stock market."
Labor costs have risen in the last two years? Really? I thought we were in a recession with nearly 10% unemployment? Energy costs? Oil is now back down to 2005 levels. Natural gas hasn't been this cheap since 2002. If those are really their excuses, they should be jumping on the opportunity to decommission NOW, before prices go back up!
And as to them losing money in the stock market - boo hoo. They could have put the funds into inflation protected treasury notes, but they wanted the extra profits to reduce how much they had to pay out. They gambled, they lost, they should have to pay up. If they can't - we have bankruptcy laws just for them (which we should have immediately applied to the banking mess too). Or they could take out a nice fat loan - interest rates are pretty low, I hear.
I'd love to say I can't believe they're getting away with this - but given recent history of forgiving the villains and putting the burden on the taxpayers and individual investors, I just can't muster disbelief any more.
This seems really dumb, given how expensive as it is to launch mass off the Earth. Why not at least park it somewhere away from Earth, but where someone could eventually use it?
Supposedly the ISS will eventually have some VASIMR plasma thrusters attached to experiment with using that form of propulsion to keep it in orbit. Why not just take up a full load of reaction mass, for VASIMR? Shut down everything else that's drawing power (the solar panels don't provide enough energy to run VASIMR continuously). Use VASIMR's "high thrust" mode to run from LEO to above the van Allen belts as quickly as possible, and then using VASIMR's "efficient thrust" mode, shift into a highly elliptical orbit, eventually a lunar transfer orbit, and finally in a nice parking orbit around the moon?
Hey - if it survives the trip in reasonably good shape, maybe it could even be used for something for exploring the moon - an emergency orbital shelter perhaps, or at least a cheap communication relay satellite? Worst case, crash it into the moon somewhere a future lunar base could mine the scrap.
I dunno - must be rocket science, 'cause I can't understand why they'd waste all that lovely and expensive delta-V.
How about making the reflective envelope elliptical in cross section, putting the filament at one focus and a yttrium "mantle" filament at the 2nd focus? If I've wikigoogled the facts right, the filament is heated to around 6000degC, and a mantle will glow at around 2000degC. Reflecting heat onto the filament raises its temp, making it a more efficient light emitter - but doesn't increase the light emitting surface area. But maybe with a second filament, more heat energy would be converted to light than is gained by the increased efficiency of the method in the article?
Or maybe just wrap the tungsten filament with yttrium - larger surface area to glow, but lower conductivity than the filament (~10x higher resistance than tungsten) so it doesn't increase current much.
I hope someone will mirror the data there the instant it appears, so when someone in power decides that an inconveniently revealed truth needs to be shoved down the memory hole, a web app will instantly highlight any redacted information.
While dynamically updatable tattoo displays are interesting for output, one could achieve 90% of the tattoo value using an eInk, and externally applying an electrostatic pattern gadget to "print" the tattoo pattern.
I guess I'm over-sensitive - but I sort of found the Brown gift to Obama offensive.
Not because it was racist or anything - but because it was sort of a gift that no one *except* someone very powerful in government would ever have a chance to have made just so they could give it as a gift.
Do you think that *you* would be allowed to hack a chunk of wood off of the remains of a historical ship, to be carved into a pencil holder? It just reeks of the sort of thing a king might do - because who could deny him whatever he wants?
Obama's gifts, on the other hand, were things any of us could have acquired or created. Maybe not terribly personal in the case of the DVDs (obviously something someone rushed to do at the last second), but better with the loaded iPod in that at least some thought and effort went into it - though perhaps still not quite "appropriate" given the recipient, but paired with the rare songbook, a reasonable gift.
I think the Queen has the right idea - give out a standard gift, appreciated by most, not too tacky.
What would it take to make a good (or even great) Blade Runner sequel?
The original became a cult hit mainly because (a) it had an interesting, well textured setting (b) it projected a very clear style or mood that fit well with (c) an interesting moral question about what makes one "human" that is ultimately left up to the viewer, (d) while including enough action directly related to the question to keep it interesting on first viewing.
I think a good sequel would need to (a) replicate and build on the setting (b) choose a DIFFERENT question, or perhaps deeper examination of the original moral question to examine; and (c) fit the style/mood to that examination - and of course (d) driving it all with some cool action scenes.
Forget the off-world colonies - it's far more interesting to look at how alien Earth would have become, to our eyes. The original looked at an organic mix of decaying remnants of today's cities threaded and overshadowed by ultra-tech future stuff, and invaded by "foreigners" (apparently many natives having moved on to the off-world colonies?) OK, what is happening elsewhere? We saw a city apparently sapped by climate turned hot and wet - global warming has run amuk.
How's that affecting the rest of the country/world? Drought-ruined farm lands? Chicago by an empty Great Lakes basin (water mostly diverted to the new agricultural band across Canada, just a few big pipelines running to the city), surrounded by dusty desert, maybe growing food in towers? Ice age in Europe? London flooded? Expanding seas flooded the Mediterranean and turned lots of cities into Venice equivalents (and sunk Venice itself)? But now a dam is built across the Straits of Gibraltar - generating power as water is let in to replace evaporation, but not letting the sea fall to it's old levels? Has there been a mini-nuke-war in the middle east or maybe Pakistan-India? Those sorts of things would be interesting to look at. (And the nuke war assumption, shown in a few quick scenes, might serve as a warning to today's bickering countries with nukes or ambitions.) Instead of sitting in one city, the sequel should get out and around the world.
What interesting moral question might be examined? How about a serious re-examination of Hollywood's constant droning "it's good to age and die" formula? Perhaps the hero is struggling to put together enough money to replace his failing synth-organs, even as he moves through the richest and poorest levels of society? How about effectively immortal wealthy parents who keep their kids "young and innocent" - a 43 year old kid that looks 7 leading a secret life while playing a role to keep the parents happily self-deceived? Hmm - that edges on "What is adulthood? What is perversion? Is it more perverse to "force" someone to be a child forever, or for that "child" to behave as the adult they mentally are? [It doesn't have to turn the movie into child-porn - create a scenario in which a "straight-adult" hero is tempted but resists out of old-fashioned moral scruples he's not sure really apply any more - controversial enough.]
Maybe have the hero be someone arriving back from the off-world colonies, so we see this strange new world through his eyes - the tech is mostly not strange to him, but the culture would appear involuted and perverted, coming from a more straight-forward off-world culture where kids grow up fast because they're needed.
They SHOULD have scanned him to 3D to be embedded in a digital picture frame running a 3D animation program on a thin computer, driven byh some simple AI that would recognize that someone is standing in front of the frame, causing him to smile, wave, maybe say hello or tell the person "We can do it!", etc.
Jackson "charges" nuclear power with CO2 emmisions and deaths equivalent to several large cities burning each year due to nuclear war, on the grounds that nuclear power plants encourage countries to get nuclear weapons. That sounds kind of backwards - isn't it countries that want nuclear weapons getting nuclear power plants as a means to that end? Shall we also blame electric car crash deaths on alternative energy electric vehicles?
He uses CO2 estimates of construction and fuel extraction and plant decommissioning and waste storage. Umm - but wouldn't most of those things be powered largely by the clean alternative energy electricity - of whatever form - that replaces fossil fuels? Isn't that kind of what his whole report is about? So why isn't that factored in? Could it be because it adds such a huge CO2 boost to nuclear power (which otherwise would have none), and only a small CO2 boost to his favorite - Wind power? And that's assuming his figures are un-biased, which the rest of his paper gives great cause to doubt!
Wind is good and clean - but you have to have back-up capacity for times when the wind doesn't blow or blows too hard - he discusses how other alternative energy might be used for that - but then apparently doesn't charge the CO2 and deaths and land area for those to wind power. And the best wind is far from the cities that could use it - requiring building of transmission, which he doesn't appear to analyze at all in his CO2 or land estimates.
Concentrated solar has promise. But he gently glosses over how much land it takes up - 0.5% of US land area to power the US is HUGE. That ethanol requires vastly more area doesn't change that fact.
For nuclear power plant land area he adds about 3x to 4x more land for a big buffer zone around each 1GW plant- but prefers to talk about the "footprint" for wind towers - i.e. just the tiny area under a wind tower's foundation. Factor in the 0.44 sq-km area tied up by each 5MW wind tower, and the wind equivalent of a 1GW nuclear power plant becomes about 88sq-km. Why couldn't nuclear power plants be clustered together like wind farms, and share their buffer zone? Even putting two 1GW plants next to each other would cut the land use estimate nearly in half. Seems like a double standard is being used.
Wind is a cool, good technology - there are many reasons to favor it. And maybe nuclear power is the wrong choice, for many reasons. But anyone basing that decision on Jackson's report is being badly misled.
Discrete graphics cards will be a niche market in a few years, left mainly to NVidia - notebooks are displacing all but the cheapest desktops and a tiny remnant of high end desktops. Graphics progress is slowing way down, which means integrated (CPU and system board) graphics is going to catch up (their longer design cycles won't matter as much) and suck away more of the dedicated card market. But PC users are still going to want great gaming.
Where's that take us? The "Power/Cooling Dock". Hot-dock your notebook to the PCD, and it gets more power AND more cooling capacity. 2x or 4x as many CPU cores and GPU cores power up, and maybe another bank of memory turns on. Your notebook computer becomes a game-playing monster. The docking station is wired to your large screen TV AND large screen desktop monitor, and of course your hard wired broadband connection.
OR
Microsoft comes out with their new closed *virtual* gaming environment - no hardware, or maybe just a little device that standardizes older PCs. They make their money licensing and selling games to run under that standard, and access to their carefully crafted on-line gaming network.
OR
Nintendo brings out their new console - it's a box that can run flash-memory games stand-alone - but it is easily set up to use any network attached PC as a "server" for hard drive and optical disc drive and keyboard and mouse. It's able to switch onto your desktop monitor or TV or even put itself in a window on your PC OS or vice versa. It's $100 cheaper than it's traditional console competitors, but has $100 more hardware dedicated to great graphics, AND they'll be making money on it by year 2.
Obama should tell all media that while they are free to make any recordings (still, audio, video) they wish to of him - since he's a public figure - but that all such recordings - the portions including him - must be fully Open and public domain if they want to use his image/voice for their commercial benefit.
Any "internet lawyers" who'd care to comment on the legalities/illegalities of that?
The article references "line Nazis" who mark everyone's hand with their position in line.
Obviously, you write a "1" on your hand, walk to the front of the line, then walk back along the line counting people. 30 peole back, you write "31" on someone's hand, hand them a marker and tell them to work their way backwards while you work your way forwards. You get to the front of the line, write "2" on the first guy's hand, nod with satisfaction at a job well done, and turn to face front.
If anyone objects, you just show them your hand...
Suppose you're standing in line, and suddenly a whole line of people just slides into place right next to your line - at least as long as your line, in parallel, and apparently planning to enter into the venue in parallel.
Do you object? Do you assume that a second line has been "officially" been opened and you just missed out?
What if the new line of people has a lot more people than your line, and they start looking over at your line and saying "Hey - get to the back of the line! No cutting!" Does a fight break out - even if your line is obviously going to lose?
They need to modify their test instructions from "act suspicious" to secretly giving one persion in 100 an assignment like "We'll pay you $10000 and protect you from any legal liability if - once you get past the detectors - you punch the operator in the nose. If the machine catches you, you get nothing."
If the machine works, the TSA operator shuttles that person safely aside into a holding area.
Surprisingly - I don't see anyone calculating volume per person...
2.3sqkm base means it's about 1.5km wide at the base. Looks like it'd be about 1km high from the picture. 1/3 base area * height = 0.767cu-km, or 767 million cu-m. Looks like the thing is about 3/4 open or shared space (streets, parks, corridors, elevators, theaters, stores, etc, etc), so about 190 million cu-m of living space.
So each individual would have about 175cu-m. A family of 4 could have 700cu-m, or about 200sq-m of floor space with high ceilings - a pretty large apartment. So it isn't quite as cramped as people seem to think.
Still, the mega-scale design is a monument to the ego of a poorly educated architect. Building collossally big is fine. Failure to build within that on a livable "human scale" is just arrogantly ignorant. It treats people as identical units to be slotted into storage compartments optimized to fit within the glorious "structure" designed by the architect.
Japan to US ratio = 63.6mbps / 2.3mbps = 27.65x better
27.65 = (1.2)**N ; increasing at 1.2x for for N years
ln(27.65) = N*ln(1.2)
N = 18.2 years.
Of course, this ignores that Japan's rate would also be increasing over that period. The article neglects to mention how fast their bandwidth is improving.
Since life extension would make older people radically healthier, do you think pharmaceutical companies will be willing to invest in or sell true anti-aging drugs, when they're making a fortune selling palliatives for the symptoms of aging?
Why kill the golden goose, when there's always more old people coming along when the current batch dies off?
They don't need copyright infringement - In order to test Glider, the developer had to violate the terms and conditions for the game. Blizzard should be able to ask the court for compensation for any damages to them arising from that.
It shouldn't be that difficult to quantify the costs - compare average play time versus average for players using Glider.
Granted NVidia is way out ahead in graphics performance - but generally you can tell when that someone is getting nervous when they start in the belligerant bragging.
The risk for NVidia isn't that Intel will surpass them, or even necessarily approach their best performance. The risk is that Intel might start catching up, cutting (further) into NVidia's market share. AMD's acquisition of ATI seems to imply that they see tight integration of graphics to be at least cheaper for a given level of performance, or higher performance for a given price. Apply that same reasoning to Intel, since they certainly aren't likely to let AMD have that advantage all to themselves.
Now try to apply that logic to NVidia - what are they going to do, merge with a distant-last-place x86 maker?
Slashdot Mirror
Some reasonably visible changes since I was born - not all invented since then, but all rolling out in a major way:
Transistors were still replacing tubes when I was a kid
Integrated circuits replacing discrete electronics, semiconductor RAM/DRAM, microprocessor
Plastic replacing many glass containers
Hand held calculators, Personal computers, handheld computers (Newton, Blackberry, iPhone)
Modems, cable data services, wireless data services, BBS systems, Internet / World Wide Web
CB radio, pagers, Cellphone, texting, internet phone, video conferencing, web conferencing
digital cameras, digital video
Medical electronics - heart monitors, sonogram, Magnetic Resonance Imaging
analog electronic watches, digital watches, LED and LCD display watches, other gadgets using LCD displays
GPS
Most of the spread of cable TV, digital cable, digital TV broadcasts, internet video/TV
Most of the change from B&W to color TVs; big screen projection TVs, flat plasma and LCD TVs, tiny portable TVs
Videotape and DVDs, now BluRay disc,
Sony walkman, MP3 players, CD audio,
floppy disc, hard disk drive, CD ROM, DVD ROM, BD ROM
Video games and PC games, handheld game units, DnD / roleplaying games
Jets replacing prop planes for commercial travel, private jets, cheap/mass air travel
Further decline of the train and interstate trucking.
Interstate Highway system development/build-out
Cargo container shipping
Sputnik, communication satellites, spy satellites, earth-observing satellites
Man in space, Man on the moon, Space Shuttle, Skylab, International Space Station
teflon pans, Microwave ovens, Dish Washers all became common in the home (all invented earlier)
White dental fillings mostly replacing silver and gold. Near painless dentistry - getting a filling was horrible as a child! Workable implants.
heart pacemakers, stints, numerous chemotherapy advances
Not TOO bad a record of innovation...
Years ago, when I (and others) pushed the idea that personal information generated as one goes about one's life should be considered private property, this is the sort of thing I expected. We should have always owned the copyright on all information generated by living our lives - "I am the author of my own history", and derivative works like IBM's should be a copyright violation.
Now it's too late - the corporations own your personal life log, and they can do whatever they want with it so long as they don't tell anyone else "personally identifying information". They can even, in some cases, deny you the right to see what they know about you, and they certainly have no requirement to actively inform you about what they're tracking about you.
The relationship should have always been the other way around - "I'm letting you use THIS specific information you gather about me for THESE purposes - anything else you want to collect or do with data I've allowed you to collect, you have to ask, same as with any other private property." Someday, some corporation will overstep somehow, and people will get angry enough to force some change.
"During the past two years, estimates of dismantling costs have soared by more than $4.6 billion because rising energy and labor costs, while the investment funds that are supposed to pay for shutting plants down have lost $4.4 billion in the battered stock market."
Labor costs have risen in the last two years? Really? I thought we were in a recession with nearly 10% unemployment?
Energy costs? Oil is now back down to 2005 levels. Natural gas hasn't been this cheap since 2002.
If those are really their excuses, they should be jumping on the opportunity to decommission NOW, before prices go back up!
And as to them losing money in the stock market - boo hoo. They could have put the funds into inflation protected treasury notes, but they wanted the extra profits to reduce how much they had to pay out. They gambled, they lost, they should have to pay up. If they can't - we have bankruptcy laws just for them (which we should have immediately applied to the banking mess too). Or they could take out a nice fat loan - interest rates are pretty low, I hear.
I'd love to say I can't believe they're getting away with this - but given recent history of forgiving the villains and putting the burden on the taxpayers and individual investors, I just can't muster disbelief any more.
This seems really dumb, given how expensive as it is to launch mass off the Earth. Why not at least park it somewhere away from Earth, but where someone could eventually use it?
Supposedly the ISS will eventually have some VASIMR plasma thrusters attached to experiment with using that form of propulsion to keep it in orbit. Why not just take up a full load of reaction mass, for VASIMR? Shut down everything else that's drawing power (the solar panels don't provide enough energy to run VASIMR continuously). Use VASIMR's "high thrust" mode to run from LEO to above the van Allen belts as quickly as possible, and then using VASIMR's "efficient thrust" mode, shift into a highly elliptical orbit, eventually a lunar transfer orbit, and finally in a nice parking orbit around the moon?
Hey - if it survives the trip in reasonably good shape, maybe it could even be used for something for exploring the moon - an emergency orbital shelter perhaps, or at least a cheap communication relay satellite? Worst case, crash it into the moon somewhere a future lunar base could mine the scrap.
I dunno - must be rocket science, 'cause I can't understand why they'd waste all that lovely and expensive delta-V.
How about making the reflective envelope elliptical in cross section, putting the filament at one focus and a yttrium "mantle" filament at the 2nd focus? If I've wikigoogled the facts right, the filament is heated to around 6000degC, and a mantle will glow at around 2000degC. Reflecting heat onto the filament raises its temp, making it a more efficient light emitter - but doesn't increase the light emitting surface area. But maybe with a second filament, more heat energy would be converted to light than is gained by the increased efficiency of the method in the article?
Or maybe just wrap the tungsten filament with yttrium - larger surface area to glow, but lower conductivity than the filament (~10x higher resistance than tungsten) so it doesn't increase current much.
I hope someone will mirror the data there the instant it appears, so when someone in power decides that an inconveniently revealed truth needs to be shoved down the memory hole, a web app will instantly highlight any redacted information.
While dynamically updatable tattoo displays are interesting for output, one could achieve 90% of the tattoo value using an eInk, and externally applying an electrostatic pattern gadget to "print" the tattoo pattern.
I guess I'm over-sensitive - but I sort of found the Brown gift to Obama offensive.
Not because it was racist or anything - but because it was sort of a gift that no one *except* someone very powerful in government would ever have a chance to have made just so they could give it as a gift.
Do you think that *you* would be allowed to hack a chunk of wood off of the remains of a historical ship, to be carved into a pencil holder? It just reeks of the sort of thing a king might do - because who could deny him whatever he wants?
Obama's gifts, on the other hand, were things any of us could have acquired or created. Maybe not terribly personal in the case of the DVDs (obviously something someone rushed to do at the last second), but better with the loaded iPod in that at least some thought and effort went into it - though perhaps still not quite "appropriate" given the recipient, but paired with the rare songbook, a reasonable gift.
I think the Queen has the right idea - give out a standard gift, appreciated by most, not too tacky.
What would it take to make a good (or even great) Blade Runner sequel?
The original became a cult hit mainly because (a) it had an interesting, well textured setting (b) it projected a very clear style or mood that fit well with (c) an interesting moral question about what makes one "human" that is ultimately left up to the viewer, (d) while including enough action directly related to the question to keep it interesting on first viewing.
I think a good sequel would need to (a) replicate and build on the setting (b) choose a DIFFERENT question, or perhaps deeper examination of the original moral question to examine; and (c) fit the style/mood to that examination - and of course (d) driving it all with some cool action scenes.
Forget the off-world colonies - it's far more interesting to look at how alien Earth would have become, to our eyes. The original looked at an organic mix of decaying remnants of today's cities threaded and overshadowed by ultra-tech future stuff, and invaded by "foreigners" (apparently many natives having moved on to the off-world colonies?) OK, what is happening elsewhere? We saw a city apparently sapped by climate turned hot and wet - global warming has run amuk.
How's that affecting the rest of the country/world? Drought-ruined farm lands? Chicago by an empty Great Lakes basin (water mostly diverted to the new agricultural band across Canada, just a few big pipelines running to the city), surrounded by dusty desert, maybe growing food in towers? Ice age in Europe? London flooded? Expanding seas flooded the Mediterranean and turned lots of cities into Venice equivalents (and sunk Venice itself)? But now a dam is built across the Straits of Gibraltar - generating power as water is let in to replace evaporation, but not letting the sea fall to it's old levels? Has there been a mini-nuke-war in the middle east or maybe Pakistan-India? Those sorts of things would be interesting to look at. (And the nuke war assumption, shown in a few quick scenes, might serve as a warning to today's bickering countries with nukes or ambitions.) Instead of sitting in one city, the sequel should get out and around the world.
What interesting moral question might be examined? How about a serious re-examination of Hollywood's constant droning "it's good to age and die" formula? Perhaps the hero is struggling to put together enough money to replace his failing synth-organs, even as he moves through the richest and poorest levels of society? How about effectively immortal wealthy parents who keep their kids "young and innocent" - a 43 year old kid that looks 7 leading a secret life while playing a role to keep the parents happily self-deceived? Hmm - that edges on "What is adulthood? What is perversion? Is it more perverse to "force" someone to be a child forever, or for that "child" to behave as the adult they mentally are? [It doesn't have to turn the movie into child-porn - create a scenario in which a "straight-adult" hero is tempted but resists out of old-fashioned moral scruples he's not sure really apply any more - controversial enough.]
Maybe have the hero be someone arriving back from the off-world colonies, so we see this strange new world through his eyes - the tech is mostly not strange to him, but the culture would appear involuted and perverted, coming from a more straight-forward off-world culture where kids grow up fast because they're needed.
They SHOULD have scanned him to 3D to be embedded in a digital picture frame running a 3D animation program on a thin computer, driven byh some simple AI that would recognize that someone is standing in front of the frame, causing him to smile, wave, maybe say hello or tell the person "We can do it!", etc.
Jackson "charges" nuclear power with CO2 emmisions and deaths equivalent to several large cities burning each year due to nuclear war, on the grounds that nuclear power plants encourage countries to get nuclear weapons. That sounds kind of backwards - isn't it countries that want nuclear weapons getting nuclear power plants as a means to that end? Shall we also blame electric car crash deaths on alternative energy electric vehicles?
He uses CO2 estimates of construction and fuel extraction and plant decommissioning and waste storage. Umm - but wouldn't most of those things be powered largely by the clean alternative energy electricity - of whatever form - that replaces fossil fuels? Isn't that kind of what his whole report is about? So why isn't that factored in? Could it be because it adds such a huge CO2 boost to nuclear power (which otherwise would have none), and only a small CO2 boost to his favorite - Wind power? And that's assuming his figures are un-biased, which the rest of his paper gives great cause to doubt!
Wind is good and clean - but you have to have back-up capacity for times when the wind doesn't blow or blows too hard - he discusses how other alternative energy might be used for that - but then apparently doesn't charge the CO2 and deaths and land area for those to wind power. And the best wind is far from the cities that could use it - requiring building of transmission, which he doesn't appear to analyze at all in his CO2 or land estimates.
Concentrated solar has promise. But he gently glosses over how much land it takes up - 0.5% of US land area to power the US is HUGE. That ethanol requires vastly more area doesn't change that fact.
For nuclear power plant land area he adds about 3x to 4x more land for a big buffer zone around each 1GW plant- but prefers to talk about the "footprint" for wind towers - i.e. just the tiny area under a wind tower's foundation. Factor in the 0.44 sq-km area tied up by each 5MW wind tower, and the wind equivalent of a 1GW nuclear power plant becomes about 88sq-km. Why couldn't nuclear power plants be clustered together like wind farms, and share their buffer zone? Even putting two 1GW plants next to each other would cut the land use estimate nearly in half. Seems like a double standard is being used.
Wind is a cool, good technology - there are many reasons to favor it. And maybe nuclear power is the wrong choice, for many reasons. But anyone basing that decision on Jackson's report is being badly misled.
Discrete graphics cards will be a niche market in a few years, left mainly to NVidia - notebooks are displacing all but the cheapest desktops and a tiny remnant of high end desktops. Graphics progress is slowing way down, which means integrated (CPU and system board) graphics is going to catch up (their longer design cycles won't matter as much) and suck away more of the dedicated card market. But PC users are still going to want great gaming.
Where's that take us? The "Power/Cooling Dock". Hot-dock your notebook to the PCD, and it gets more power AND more cooling capacity. 2x or 4x as many CPU cores and GPU cores power up, and maybe another bank of memory turns on. Your notebook computer becomes a game-playing monster. The docking station is wired to your large screen TV AND large screen desktop monitor, and of course your hard wired broadband connection.
OR
Microsoft comes out with their new closed *virtual* gaming environment - no hardware, or maybe just a little device that standardizes older PCs. They make their money licensing and selling games to run under that standard, and access to their carefully crafted on-line gaming network.
OR
Nintendo brings out their new console - it's a box that can run flash-memory games stand-alone - but it is easily set up to use any network attached PC as a "server" for hard drive and optical disc drive and keyboard and mouse. It's able to switch onto your desktop monitor or TV or even put itself in a window on your PC OS or vice versa. It's $100 cheaper than it's traditional console competitors, but has $100 more hardware dedicated to great graphics, AND they'll be making money on it by year 2.
Obama should tell all media that while they are free to make any recordings (still, audio, video) they wish to of him - since he's a public figure - but that all such recordings - the portions including him - must be fully Open and public domain if they want to use his image/voice for their commercial benefit.
Any "internet lawyers" who'd care to comment on the legalities/illegalities of that?
The article references "line Nazis" who mark everyone's hand with their position in line.
Obviously, you write a "1" on your hand, walk to the front of the line, then walk back along the line counting people. 30 peole back, you write "31" on someone's hand, hand them a marker and tell them to work their way backwards while you work your way forwards. You get to the front of the line, write "2" on the first guy's hand, nod with satisfaction at a job well done, and turn to face front.
If anyone objects, you just show them your hand...
Suppose you're standing in line, and suddenly a whole line of people just slides into place right next to your line - at least as long as your line, in parallel, and apparently planning to enter into the venue in parallel.
Do you object? Do you assume that a second line has been "officially" been opened and you just missed out?
What if the new line of people has a lot more people than your line, and they start looking over at your line and saying "Hey - get to the back of the line! No cutting!" Does a fight break out - even if your line is obviously going to lose?
They need to modify their test instructions from "act suspicious" to secretly giving one persion in 100 an assignment like "We'll pay you $10000 and protect you from any legal liability if - once you get past the detectors - you punch the operator in the nose. If the machine catches you, you get nothing."
If the machine works, the TSA operator shuttles that person safely aside into a holding area.
If not...
Offer cheap power to anyone who moves near the wind power farms.
If electric power can't come to the people, move people to the electric power.
"Right on! People to the Power, man!"
Surprisingly - I don't see anyone calculating volume per person...
2.3sqkm base means it's about 1.5km wide at the base. Looks like it'd be about 1km high from the picture. 1/3 base area * height = 0.767cu-km, or 767 million cu-m. Looks like the thing is about 3/4 open or shared space (streets, parks, corridors, elevators, theaters, stores, etc, etc), so about 190 million cu-m of living space.
So each individual would have about 175cu-m. A family of 4 could have 700cu-m, or about 200sq-m of floor space with high ceilings - a pretty large apartment. So it isn't quite as cramped as people seem to think.
Still, the mega-scale design is a monument to the ego of a poorly educated architect. Building collossally big is fine. Failure to build within that on a livable "human scale" is just arrogantly ignorant. It treats people as identical units to be slotted into storage compartments optimized to fit within the glorious "structure" designed by the architect.
The lives of men with many wives only SEEM longer...
2.3mbps in 2008, vs 1.9 in 2007.
That's 1.2x better per year.
Japan to US ratio = 63.6mbps / 2.3mbps = 27.65x better
27.65 = (1.2)**N ; increasing at 1.2x for for N years
ln(27.65) = N*ln(1.2)
N = 18.2 years.
Of course, this ignores that Japan's rate would also be increasing over that period. The article neglects to mention how fast their bandwidth is improving.
Since life extension would make older people radically healthier, do you think pharmaceutical companies will be willing to invest in or sell true anti-aging drugs, when they're making a fortune selling palliatives for the symptoms of aging?
Why kill the golden goose, when there's always more old people coming along when the current batch dies off?
Go to http://www.downsizedc.org/ and register your dismay with your Representative (and Senators).
It's easy and quick. It'd better be - they're trying to rush this through - again.
Registration with personal and address information is required.
They don't need copyright infringement - In order to test Glider, the developer had to violate the terms and conditions for the game. Blizzard should be able to ask the court for compensation for any damages to them arising from that.
It shouldn't be that difficult to quantify the costs - compare average play time versus average for players using Glider.
Granted NVidia is way out ahead in graphics performance - but generally you can tell when that someone is getting nervous when they start in the belligerant bragging.
The risk for NVidia isn't that Intel will surpass them, or even necessarily approach their best performance. The risk is that Intel might start catching up, cutting (further) into NVidia's market share.
AMD's acquisition of ATI seems to imply that they see tight integration of graphics to be at least cheaper for a given level of performance, or higher performance for a given price. Apply that same reasoning to Intel, since they certainly aren't likely to let AMD have that advantage all to themselves.
Now try to apply that logic to NVidia - what are they going to do, merge with a distant-last-place x86 maker?
y'all have a limited concept of value, if you don't include enjoying yourself as part of that.
Of course, enjoyment is relative - an addict enjoys the release from pain his drugs give him, once he's addicted.
Twitter and PodCasts simply aren't addictive enough to offer even relative enjoyment. WoW and TV, if you wish to claim those are addictions, do.