Unfortunately the labor market for any particular skillset tends to be very small, to the point of oligarchy. Especially now that menial jobs are more and more commonly being "outsourced" to contracting organizations so that instead of 3,000 businesses in a city all needing janitors, you have 3 or for "janitorial service" contractors that service most of those businesses.
The result being that there's near monopoly level of abuse across much of the available labor pool, and people take whatever job they can get, despite it paying far less than the work is worth.
Oh absolutely - my intended point was that analog does things differently, and thus has different *kinds* of information loss, even at the same overall quality (assuming some way to objectively measure such a thing) . There is therefore an valid, objective basis for claiming a qualitative difference in the watching experience, even if you don't understand the science behind it.
On to a technical discussion -
Could you refer me to some source on the RGB frequency distribution choice? Google is being uncooperative, and if true it seems like an *exceptionally* stupid decision - if you're going to attempt a three-frequency approximation of the n-dimensional visual color space it makes sense to use the three colors your intended audience has sensors to detect. (I'm sure our video colors look wildly inaccurate to an octopus that sees in 11-axis color) Of course the standard was quite likely established by engineers - a group well know for their appreciation of technical elegance over "soft" human experience, so I'd be willing to believe it.
As for grain versus pixels - there are at least two important difference between the limitations of the two, especially in video. Lets say you take two "identical" photos, one digital, and one film, with an equal number of pixels and grains. The digital one will have a very obvious (and unnatural) rectilinear grid imposed upon it, making for a qualitatively different (and slightly jarring) viewing experience - at the most obvious you don't get extended "jaggies" on edges in film. Grains also bleed together smoothly, essentially giving you nigh-infinite-quality "full screen anti-aliasing" - though a DLP projector utilizing curved micro-mirrors can deliver a very similar "pixel-free" effect.
The second big effect is strictly relevant to video - with digital any point on the screen corresponds to exactly one pixel (or some fixed blending function of adjacent pixels, in the case of curved-DLP). With film in contrast, thanks to that random distribution of grains, a single point on the screen corresponds to a different sampling weight on every frame - some frames it will be nearly centered on a grain and very accurately sampled, others it will lie nearly between grains, and contribute almost nothing to the surrounding grain colors. When the frames are played back fast enough for the brain to blend them together, the result is a higher effective resolution than is present in any single frame.
There certainly are a lot of crappy cards out there claiming to be good enough for modern gaming. Where your tirade breaks down is that nVidia is no less guilty of it than anyone else. It's called having a product line, and a low-end nVidia card falls far behind a high end Radeon card.
There is legitimate information lost when going digital - both in spatial information density (film doesn't have discrete pixels), and in color spectrum density (film doesn't introduce any quantization noise).
It's also quite possible the film covers a different color space than your display and/or video format, in which case it can capture many colors your screen is completely incapable of displaying, and that your video format is incapable of encoding. In fact RGB, regardless of quality, is physically incapable of accurately capturing the complete human visual experience - it's a rough approximation at best, generated by sampling through three different band-pass filters selected to approximately match those of the average human eye - and a average *anything* is actually extremely rare.
Of course you've got plenty of analog noise that's not present in a digital recording - but as with vinyl versus CD, there's a mountain of information discarded by the digital format. Whether the loss of noise is outweighed by the loss of information is very much a personal call.
Of course, if robots and AI replace human workers, the rich will still be parasites as well, it'll just change the nature of their host.
I suppose you might be right about banning machines in that case - though of course there's an equally effective and far more profitable alternative: banning private ownership of the machines. Spread ownership of the machines (and their productivity) across the population, and you greatly reduce the division between the haves and have-nots.
It's a serious challenge - not least of which because a substantial portion of energy is shed as fast neutrons and gamma rays, neither of which are particularly easy to capture productively.
One plan to do exactly that though does spring to mind in the context of the Polywell fusion reactor. The plan being to use a high voltage spherical ion strap to accelerate protons and boron into a central fusing point, where it the resulting reaction would produce high speed alpha particles (helium nuclei) that would then climb the electrostatic gradient and come almost completely to rest before contacting a conductive shell around the reactor and pulling off neutralizing electrons.
Sadly, I've heard nothing of Polywell since they dropped off the radar a couple years back. At the time the sparse NAVY progress reports suggested that they had successfully demonstrated p-B fusion, and other sources suggested they were taking their research private to develop a commercial reactor. So we can hope, but don't hold your breath.
No salts - from what I can find on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilopower ), since NASA's site is sadly bereft of detail:
...the core of the reactor will be of solid, cast uranium-235 surrounded by a beryllium oxide reflector. This reflector focuses neutron emissions and returns their energy back into the core to minimize nuclear gamma radiation which could impair on-board electronics.
Nuclear reaction control is provided by a single rod of boron carbide which is a neutron moderator that is initially fully inserted, so that pre-launch radiation is negligible. Once the moderator is extracted the nuclear chain reaction will start but can not be stopped completely, although the depth of insertion provides a mechanism to adjust the heat output from the reactor core to the load demand.
Passive heat pipes filled with liquid sodium then transfer the reactor core heat to one or more Stirling engines, which converts heat into rotary motion that drives a conventional electric generator. The melting point of sodium is 98 C (208 F) which means that liquid sodium can flow freely at high temperatures between about 400 and 700 C (750 and 1,300 F) while nuclear fission cores typically work at about 600 C (1,100 F).
I'm not terribly surprised, really. Molten salt reactors typically rely on gravity to power the fuel convection, as well as the "safe" meltdown behavior. Since these are designed primarily for microgravity conditions in deep space, existing molten-salt reactor designs would be useless. Even on the moon or Mars you'd need a reactor designed for 17% or 38% gravity, respectively.
The meltdown protection is likewise not terribly relevant - if your probe's reactor fails, it's dead, regardless of how "safe" the failure was. On the Moon or Mars you have some long-term environmental contamination concern - but the local environment would kill you just as quickly without radioactive contamination, and there are minimal (known) geological or ecological processes to cause the contamination to spread (rather than just melt it's way down into a nicely contained borehole) so it's not that urgent of a problem. Plus the amount of fuel in these is miniscule compared to the 100 tonnes of enriched uranium in a typical MW-scale reactor on Earth.
This thing is categorically NOT designed for colonies, though they could be shoehorned into doing the job early on in the absence of anything better. They just don't deliver enough power - their own example has four of the scaled-up 10kW models combined to deliver enough power for a single initial outpost - 40kW will keep a small research outpost alive, but provides very little excess energy to fuel ecosystem and industry growth, both of which would be critical for a colony.
These are designed primarily for research missions, especially robotic deep-space missions to Jupiter and beyond, where solar ceases to be particularly useful. Currently we mostly use RTGs to power for such missions, but those deliver very little power (typically hundreds of watts at the most), which severely limits the possible mission scope.
And as far as colonies and outposts are concerned - with a little luck the BFR will enable high payload round trips to the moon within the next decade, possibly well before then. At that point both research outposts and aggressive robotic exploration become far more relevant, and it'd be nice to have a thoroughly tested power system ready long before then so that early missions can focus on how to maximize it's utility, rather than trying to develop that as well.
Between the SpaceX BFR, Bigelow inflatable habitats, and now Kilopower reactors, we have a good chance of having all the necessary components for a lunar outpost ready to deploy within a mere handful of years - that's something that couldn't be realistically considered even 5 or ten years ago. That moves the conversation from "Can we do this?" to "What should the mission profile be?" That's huge progress, and if we start seriously planning now, we just might have a solid mission plan ready by the time it becomes possible.
No, absolutely not "some are more equal than others". I'm sorry if I wan't sufficiently clear.
Any time you're talking across a cultural rift, the potential for misunderstandings and hurt feelings is increased, and good graces demand you make a little more effort to be understanding and respectful, because such extra effort is almost certainly required in order to have functionally the same conversation as with someone in your same culture group.
Women should be a little more careful of their words when talking to men. And men should be so when talking to women. Same with whites/blacks/hispanics/asians/etc/etc/etc. Misunderstandings are more likely, and so more effort is required by *everyone involved* to deliver the same amount of social courtesy.
I think you're missing the point - it's not about treating women and minorities with respect because of their differences - it's about NOT treating them with disrespect because of them. i.e., treating them at least as respectfully as you would if they were white men, and perhaps slightly more so in deference to the fact that you're interacting across a cultural divide, and it's thus easier to inflict unintentional hard feelings, on both sides.
If you can't effectively call out someone's idiocy without mentioning their their race or gender, perhaps you need to consider that your real problem with them has nothing to do with idiocy.
In addition, if you can't call someone's idiocy in a social setting without being unnecessarily cruel and disrespectful, perhaps you need to work on basic social skills a bit more before trying to join a collaborative project.
Agreed, I use Everything all the time - even on Linux (using WINE). I've yet to find anything else remotely close. It also helped get me into the habit of taking the extra time to give my documents long descriptive names - typing a three-letter sequence of two different words in the name generally brings it to the first page of results - and if not, a few more letters almost certainly will.
With that I agree completely, I was more addressing the SoC limitations raised in the comment I replied to. Component lag is a problem, performance of the rendering pipeline on the other hand can be worked around by lowering detail expectations.
I'm rather surprised though that it doesn't have at least accelerometer-based "fake" positional tracking - obviously it couldn't be extremely accurate, but you'd think it would be better than completely ignoring position. Seems like having at least two accelerometers, one on the goggles and one on the back of the head, would make distinguishing between rotation and translation relatively straightforward. Then again, perhaps they tried it and found that "close" positional tracking was even worse than "none" for nausea, etc.
It sounds like this is firmly targetted at the 3D cinema, etc. experience - such as their socializingprogram with game tables, etc. in a private "theater".
The obvious solution is to make less detailed games for it. The original Wii was extremely popular despite positively crude graphics, in large part due to novelty, physicality, and generally excellent use of available potential. As long as you can push enough pixels to keep the edges smooth(ish) and see into the distance a ways,fast enough to avoid nausea, it might not matter so much if the graphics reminds you a little of the VR from an 80's movie.
Heck, I'd fully expect quite a few experiences to embrace that aesthetic - there's a lot people out there who would probably enjoy the nostalgia-become-reality.
I was only pointing out that there ARE in fact benefits to a no-monopolies situation, and that it is not an obviously minimum-benefit point on the continuum that their phrasing seems to imply. And that realization is important to a well-informed discussion.
Yes, the great spectacles would probably be less common without some protection, but incremental improvements would probably be much more common. Which contributes more to the overall advancement is a non-obvious topic for discussion as we attempt to optimize the balance (assuming that is the goal, rather than just ever-increasing corporate handouts).
The fact that available services will be auto-negotiated does indeed solve most of the technical problems, and should, if I understand correctly, completely prevent short circuits, etc. so long as you use properly certified cables. However, they do very little to address the *human* problems.
You grab a compliant USB 2 cable, you know it will work with any USB 2 (or 1) devices it fits in. USB-3.1 type C in comparison has at least three different cables mentioned on Wikipedia - full featured, active(for Thunderbolt), and adapters.
Then, even assuming you have the right cable, you still have the problem with not-necessarily-shared protocols: Say you want to send video via USB - there's four different options: DisplayPort, MHL, HDMI, and Thunderbolt, and from what I can find there's no requirement for graceful fail-over. You may quite easily find yourself in the situation where Device A and Display B both support video-over-USB, but not the same protocol. You'd hope everyone would at least support the royalty-free DisplayPort protocol as the least common denominator, but I saw no mention of such a requirement. The little support logos can help, if used, but that requires people memorize the meanings of several different logos with non-obvious relevance. And let's be honest - we're never going to see all those logos stamped on the back of an iPhone, regardless of support. And the things that do have them will likely be embossed black plastic - virtually illegible in less-than-perfect lighting.
So basically they've created a situation where human frustration is likely to abound, despite what is technically an impressive product. Or more accurately, an environment where such a situation is very likely to arise.
>The law of nature, according to them, gives to every man a sacred and indefeasible property in his own ideas, in the fruits of his own reason and imagination.
It seems odd to me that any well-reasoned man could truly believe this - without government (the law of man) to impose a monopoly, there is nothing to stop one man from copying the ideas of another, except that he never share them in the first place. That is the law of nature.
That was, I thought, the original reasoning behind technology patents: that the creator would clearly describe the mechanisms of their invention, sharing their hard-earned knowledge so that any other could learn from it without the burden of reverse engineering. And in exchange for freely sharing that knowledge, be granted a limited window when they were protected even from those who would otherwise have successfully performed the reverse engineering.
Are you sure? Do you truly believe that no art would be produced, nor science or technology developed, without the promise of ongoing economic reward for your work? Most of human history would suggest otherwise. And the benefit of zero protections is that derivative works may be developed immediately without any hindrance by the original creator.
Since the adoption of patents for example, several countries have at various times decided to remove them - and generally enjoyed a technological renaissance until being pressured into re-adopting them. Now - how much of that renaissance was, like Hollywood's early years, due to wholesale copying of other people's work can be debated - but there was obviously value to be had in completely removing the monopolies.
Yep. All you need to do is make an unassailable digital fortress - something that experts have been trying and failing to accomplish since before the internet existed. And then keep the all "bad guy" authoritarians out, while letting the "good guy" commoners and anarchists in. Frankly, I think the first task will be a lot easier.
And then, assuming you somehow against all odds manage to accomplish the above - there's still the tiny problem that the authorities have the to power to declare your fortress illegal with the stroke of a pen, and then arrest anyone who makes even passing use of it. And given just how powerful it would be in organizing resistance to (il)legitimate authority, only a fool would think they wouldn't do so. Really hard to sneak anything past the people providing your internet connection, and as a rule they're all too happy to participate with authorities in any underhanded, even outright illegal mass surveillance programs they desire. Or were you not paying attention to all the NSA programs that were exposed in the last decade?
In case you're serious - the jars are only there to keep the air samples from mixing with the surrounding air so that you can perform a meaningful experiment. We have something that has the same containing effect on the Earth's atmosphere - it's called gravity, perhaps you've heard of it.
Nobody said the atmosphere was opaque to IR - in fact I SPECIFICALLY said "100% of solar radiation will eventually escape back to space", and thermal IR is how it's going to get out.
Greenhouse gasses don't block IR, they scatter it. And the more scattering, the longer it takes a photon leaving the Earth's surface to finally escape from the upper atmosphere. Which in turn slows the normal cooling process and causes the temperature to increase.
Notice the one thing you CAN'T see in your video: the planet's surface. Because IR can't reach space directly from the surface. You can see hints of the outlines of the continents - but they're in black. You're not seeing the continent, you're seeing the disruptions they cause in the atmospheric flows, which cause local temperature drops.
> If we can figure out a way to seal cellulose against decomposition
It's called biochar - burn the wood without oxygen, and it drives off most of the non-carbon components, rendering it biologically stable. As an added bonus when you crush it and mix it into the soil it boosts fertility without being consumed.
The problem is one of scale and motive - we release around 160 billion tons of fossil carbon every year, that's a lot of biomass to grow and carbonize. And it's not going to anywhere be NEARLY as profitable as mining fossil fuels - good luck selling an average of 23 tons of soil enrichment "fertilizer" to every person on the planet year after year.
Volcanoes vent around 200 million tons of fossil carbon per year, while humans release roughly 160 BILLION tons. All the volcanoes combined release only 0.125% as much fossil carbon as we do.
It would take a truly horrifying year of volcanoes, with 1000x the average level of activity, to release as much carbon as we do. And that would only be one year. One year of human emissions isn't a big problem - it's when you string 100 years of steadily increasing emissions together back-to-back that it becomes a problem.
Biochar also stops the process, and can be created from much faster-growing plants. Not as profitable though, but it could also be adopted as the end-of-life destination for all that lumber - turning trees into "coal" once you've gotten your use out of them. You could even turn around and sell the crushed biochar as an inert soil additive to boost fertility.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately the labor market for any particular skillset tends to be very small, to the point of oligarchy. Especially now that menial jobs are more and more commonly being "outsourced" to contracting organizations so that instead of 3,000 businesses in a city all needing janitors, you have 3 or for "janitorial service" contractors that service most of those businesses.
The result being that there's near monopoly level of abuse across much of the available labor pool, and people take whatever job they can get, despite it paying far less than the work is worth.
Oh absolutely - my intended point was that analog does things differently, and thus has different *kinds* of information loss, even at the same overall quality (assuming some way to objectively measure such a thing) . There is therefore an valid, objective basis for claiming a qualitative difference in the watching experience, even if you don't understand the science behind it.
On to a technical discussion -
Could you refer me to some source on the RGB frequency distribution choice? Google is being uncooperative, and if true it seems like an *exceptionally* stupid decision - if you're going to attempt a three-frequency approximation of the n-dimensional visual color space it makes sense to use the three colors your intended audience has sensors to detect. (I'm sure our video colors look wildly inaccurate to an octopus that sees in 11-axis color) Of course the standard was quite likely established by engineers - a group well know for their appreciation of technical elegance over "soft" human experience, so I'd be willing to believe it.
As for grain versus pixels - there are at least two important difference between the limitations of the two, especially in video. Lets say you take two "identical" photos, one digital, and one film, with an equal number of pixels and grains. The digital one will have a very obvious (and unnatural) rectilinear grid imposed upon it, making for a qualitatively different (and slightly jarring) viewing experience - at the most obvious you don't get extended "jaggies" on edges in film. Grains also bleed together smoothly, essentially giving you nigh-infinite-quality "full screen anti-aliasing" - though a DLP projector utilizing curved micro-mirrors can deliver a very similar "pixel-free" effect.
The second big effect is strictly relevant to video - with digital any point on the screen corresponds to exactly one pixel (or some fixed blending function of adjacent pixels, in the case of curved-DLP). With film in contrast, thanks to that random distribution of grains, a single point on the screen corresponds to a different sampling weight on every frame - some frames it will be nearly centered on a grain and very accurately sampled, others it will lie nearly between grains, and contribute almost nothing to the surrounding grain colors. When the frames are played back fast enough for the brain to blend them together, the result is a higher effective resolution than is present in any single frame.
There certainly are a lot of crappy cards out there claiming to be good enough for modern gaming. Where your tirade breaks down is that nVidia is no less guilty of it than anyone else. It's called having a product line, and a low-end nVidia card falls far behind a high end Radeon card.
There is legitimate information lost when going digital - both in spatial information density (film doesn't have discrete pixels), and in color spectrum density (film doesn't introduce any quantization noise).
It's also quite possible the film covers a different color space than your display and/or video format, in which case it can capture many colors your screen is completely incapable of displaying, and that your video format is incapable of encoding. In fact RGB, regardless of quality, is physically incapable of accurately capturing the complete human visual experience - it's a rough approximation at best, generated by sampling through three different band-pass filters selected to approximately match those of the average human eye - and a average *anything* is actually extremely rare.
Of course you've got plenty of analog noise that's not present in a digital recording - but as with vinyl versus CD, there's a mountain of information discarded by the digital format. Whether the loss of noise is outweighed by the loss of information is very much a personal call.
Whoosh.
Of course, if robots and AI replace human workers, the rich will still be parasites as well, it'll just change the nature of their host.
I suppose you might be right about banning machines in that case - though of course there's an equally effective and far more profitable alternative: banning private ownership of the machines. Spread ownership of the machines (and their productivity) across the population, and you greatly reduce the division between the haves and have-nots.
It's a serious challenge - not least of which because a substantial portion of energy is shed as fast neutrons and gamma rays, neither of which are particularly easy to capture productively.
One plan to do exactly that though does spring to mind in the context of the Polywell fusion reactor. The plan being to use a high voltage spherical ion strap to accelerate protons and boron into a central fusing point, where it the resulting reaction would produce high speed alpha particles (helium nuclei) that would then climb the electrostatic gradient and come almost completely to rest before contacting a conductive shell around the reactor and pulling off neutralizing electrons.
Sadly, I've heard nothing of Polywell since they dropped off the radar a couple years back. At the time the sparse NAVY progress reports suggested that they had successfully demonstrated p-B fusion, and other sources suggested they were taking their research private to develop a commercial reactor. So we can hope, but don't hold your breath.
No salts - from what I can find on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilopower ), since NASA's site is sadly bereft of detail:
Nuclear reaction control is provided by a single rod of boron carbide which is a neutron moderator that is initially fully inserted, so that pre-launch radiation is negligible. Once the moderator is extracted the nuclear chain reaction will start but can not be stopped completely, although the depth of insertion provides a mechanism to adjust the heat output from the reactor core to the load demand.
Passive heat pipes filled with liquid sodium then transfer the reactor core heat to one or more Stirling engines, which converts heat into rotary motion that drives a conventional electric generator. The melting point of sodium is 98 C (208 F) which means that liquid sodium can flow freely at high temperatures between about 400 and 700 C (750 and 1,300 F) while nuclear fission cores typically work at about 600 C (1,100 F).
I'm not terribly surprised, really. Molten salt reactors typically rely on gravity to power the fuel convection, as well as the "safe" meltdown behavior. Since these are designed primarily for microgravity conditions in deep space, existing molten-salt reactor designs would be useless. Even on the moon or Mars you'd need a reactor designed for 17% or 38% gravity, respectively.
The meltdown protection is likewise not terribly relevant - if your probe's reactor fails, it's dead, regardless of how "safe" the failure was. On the Moon or Mars you have some long-term environmental contamination concern - but the local environment would kill you just as quickly without radioactive contamination, and there are minimal (known) geological or ecological processes to cause the contamination to spread (rather than just melt it's way down into a nicely contained borehole) so it's not that urgent of a problem. Plus the amount of fuel in these is miniscule compared to the 100 tonnes of enriched uranium in a typical MW-scale reactor on Earth.
This thing is categorically NOT designed for colonies, though they could be shoehorned into doing the job early on in the absence of anything better. They just don't deliver enough power - their own example has four of the scaled-up 10kW models combined to deliver enough power for a single initial outpost - 40kW will keep a small research outpost alive, but provides very little excess energy to fuel ecosystem and industry growth, both of which would be critical for a colony.
These are designed primarily for research missions, especially robotic deep-space missions to Jupiter and beyond, where solar ceases to be particularly useful. Currently we mostly use RTGs to power for such missions, but those deliver very little power (typically hundreds of watts at the most), which severely limits the possible mission scope.
And as far as colonies and outposts are concerned - with a little luck the BFR will enable high payload round trips to the moon within the next decade, possibly well before then. At that point both research outposts and aggressive robotic exploration become far more relevant, and it'd be nice to have a thoroughly tested power system ready long before then so that early missions can focus on how to maximize it's utility, rather than trying to develop that as well.
Between the SpaceX BFR, Bigelow inflatable habitats, and now Kilopower reactors, we have a good chance of having all the necessary components for a lunar outpost ready to deploy within a mere handful of years - that's something that couldn't be realistically considered even 5 or ten years ago. That moves the conversation from "Can we do this?" to "What should the mission profile be?" That's huge progress, and if we start seriously planning now, we just might have a solid mission plan ready by the time it becomes possible.
I'm confused, why would the parasitic rich want to solve the parasite problem?
By that metric *every* game genre is pay-to-play, unless you know somewhere handing out free consoles or PCs (in which case, please share!)
No, absolutely not "some are more equal than others". I'm sorry if I wan't sufficiently clear.
Any time you're talking across a cultural rift, the potential for misunderstandings and hurt feelings is increased, and good graces demand you make a little more effort to be understanding and respectful, because such extra effort is almost certainly required in order to have functionally the same conversation as with someone in your same culture group.
Women should be a little more careful of their words when talking to men. And men should be so when talking to women. Same with whites/blacks/hispanics/asians/etc/etc/etc. Misunderstandings are more likely, and so more effort is required by *everyone involved* to deliver the same amount of social courtesy.
I think you're missing the point - it's not about treating women and minorities with respect because of their differences - it's about NOT treating them with disrespect because of them. i.e., treating them at least as respectfully as you would if they were white men, and perhaps slightly more so in deference to the fact that you're interacting across a cultural divide, and it's thus easier to inflict unintentional hard feelings, on both sides.
If you can't effectively call out someone's idiocy without mentioning their their race or gender, perhaps you need to consider that your real problem with them has nothing to do with idiocy.
In addition, if you can't call someone's idiocy in a social setting without being unnecessarily cruel and disrespectful, perhaps you need to work on basic social skills a bit more before trying to join a collaborative project.
Agreed, I use Everything all the time - even on Linux (using WINE). I've yet to find anything else remotely close. It also helped get me into the habit of taking the extra time to give my documents long descriptive names - typing a three-letter sequence of two different words in the name generally brings it to the first page of results - and if not, a few more letters almost certainly will.
With that I agree completely, I was more addressing the SoC limitations raised in the comment I replied to. Component lag is a problem, performance of the rendering pipeline on the other hand can be worked around by lowering detail expectations.
I'm rather surprised though that it doesn't have at least accelerometer-based "fake" positional tracking - obviously it couldn't be extremely accurate, but you'd think it would be better than completely ignoring position. Seems like having at least two accelerometers, one on the goggles and one on the back of the head, would make distinguishing between rotation and translation relatively straightforward. Then again, perhaps they tried it and found that "close" positional tracking was even worse than "none" for nausea, etc.
It sounds like this is firmly targetted at the 3D cinema, etc. experience - such as their socializingprogram with game tables, etc. in a private "theater".
Realism isn't everything.
The obvious solution is to make less detailed games for it. The original Wii was extremely popular despite positively crude graphics, in large part due to novelty, physicality, and generally excellent use of available potential. As long as you can push enough pixels to keep the edges smooth(ish) and see into the distance a ways,fast enough to avoid nausea, it might not matter so much if the graphics reminds you a little of the VR from an 80's movie.
Heck, I'd fully expect quite a few experiences to embrace that aesthetic - there's a lot people out there who would probably enjoy the nostalgia-become-reality.
I was only pointing out that there ARE in fact benefits to a no-monopolies situation, and that it is not an obviously minimum-benefit point on the continuum that their phrasing seems to imply. And that realization is important to a well-informed discussion.
Yes, the great spectacles would probably be less common without some protection, but incremental improvements would probably be much more common. Which contributes more to the overall advancement is a non-obvious topic for discussion as we attempt to optimize the balance (assuming that is the goal, rather than just ever-increasing corporate handouts).
The fact that available services will be auto-negotiated does indeed solve most of the technical problems, and should, if I understand correctly, completely prevent short circuits, etc. so long as you use properly certified cables. However, they do very little to address the *human* problems.
You grab a compliant USB 2 cable, you know it will work with any USB 2 (or 1) devices it fits in. USB-3.1 type C in comparison has at least three different cables mentioned on Wikipedia - full featured, active(for Thunderbolt), and adapters.
Then, even assuming you have the right cable, you still have the problem with not-necessarily-shared protocols: Say you want to send video via USB - there's four different options: DisplayPort, MHL, HDMI, and Thunderbolt, and from what I can find there's no requirement for graceful fail-over. You may quite easily find yourself in the situation where Device A and Display B both support video-over-USB, but not the same protocol. You'd hope everyone would at least support the royalty-free DisplayPort protocol as the least common denominator, but I saw no mention of such a requirement. The little support logos can help, if used, but that requires people memorize the meanings of several different logos with non-obvious relevance. And let's be honest - we're never going to see all those logos stamped on the back of an iPhone, regardless of support. And the things that do have them will likely be embossed black plastic - virtually illegible in less-than-perfect lighting.
So basically they've created a situation where human frustration is likely to abound, despite what is technically an impressive product. Or more accurately, an environment where such a situation is very likely to arise.
>The law of nature, according to them, gives to every man a sacred and indefeasible property in his own ideas, in the fruits of his own reason and imagination.
It seems odd to me that any well-reasoned man could truly believe this - without government (the law of man) to impose a monopoly, there is nothing to stop one man from copying the ideas of another, except that he never share them in the first place. That is the law of nature.
That was, I thought, the original reasoning behind technology patents: that the creator would clearly describe the mechanisms of their invention, sharing their hard-earned knowledge so that any other could learn from it without the burden of reverse engineering. And in exchange for freely sharing that knowledge, be granted a limited window when they were protected even from those who would otherwise have successfully performed the reverse engineering.
>Zero time obviously has no benefit.
Are you sure? Do you truly believe that no art would be produced, nor science or technology developed, without the promise of ongoing economic reward for your work? Most of human history would suggest otherwise. And the benefit of zero protections is that derivative works may be developed immediately without any hindrance by the original creator.
Since the adoption of patents for example, several countries have at various times decided to remove them - and generally enjoyed a technological renaissance until being pressured into re-adopting them. Now - how much of that renaissance was, like Hollywood's early years, due to wholesale copying of other people's work can be debated - but there was obviously value to be had in completely removing the monopolies.
Yep. All you need to do is make an unassailable digital fortress - something that experts have been trying and failing to accomplish since before the internet existed. And then keep the all "bad guy" authoritarians out, while letting the "good guy" commoners and anarchists in. Frankly, I think the first task will be a lot easier.
And then, assuming you somehow against all odds manage to accomplish the above - there's still the tiny problem that the authorities have the to power to declare your fortress illegal with the stroke of a pen, and then arrest anyone who makes even passing use of it. And given just how powerful it would be in organizing resistance to (il)legitimate authority, only a fool would think they wouldn't do so. Really hard to sneak anything past the people providing your internet connection, and as a rule they're all too happy to participate with authorities in any underhanded, even outright illegal mass surveillance programs they desire. Or were you not paying attention to all the NSA programs that were exposed in the last decade?
In case you're serious - the jars are only there to keep the air samples from mixing with the surrounding air so that you can perform a meaningful experiment. We have something that has the same containing effect on the Earth's atmosphere - it's called gravity, perhaps you've heard of it.
Nobody said the atmosphere was opaque to IR - in fact I SPECIFICALLY said "100% of solar radiation will eventually escape back to space", and thermal IR is how it's going to get out.
Greenhouse gasses don't block IR, they scatter it. And the more scattering, the longer it takes a photon leaving the Earth's surface to finally escape from the upper atmosphere. Which in turn slows the normal cooling process and causes the temperature to increase.
Notice the one thing you CAN'T see in your video: the planet's surface. Because IR can't reach space directly from the surface. You can see hints of the outlines of the continents - but they're in black. You're not seeing the continent, you're seeing the disruptions they cause in the atmospheric flows, which cause local temperature drops.
> If we can figure out a way to seal cellulose against decomposition
It's called biochar - burn the wood without oxygen, and it drives off most of the non-carbon components, rendering it biologically stable. As an added bonus when you crush it and mix it into the soil it boosts fertility without being consumed.
The problem is one of scale and motive - we release around 160 billion tons of fossil carbon every year, that's a lot of biomass to grow and carbonize. And it's not going to anywhere be NEARLY as profitable as mining fossil fuels - good luck selling an average of 23 tons of soil enrichment "fertilizer" to every person on the planet year after year.
Um - no.
Volcanoes vent around 200 million tons of fossil carbon per year, while humans release roughly 160 BILLION tons. All the volcanoes combined release only 0.125% as much fossil carbon as we do.
It would take a truly horrifying year of volcanoes, with 1000x the average level of activity, to release as much carbon as we do. And that would only be one year. One year of human emissions isn't a big problem - it's when you string 100 years of steadily increasing emissions together back-to-back that it becomes a problem.
Biochar also stops the process, and can be created from much faster-growing plants. Not as profitable though, but it could also be adopted as the end-of-life destination for all that lumber - turning trees into "coal" once you've gotten your use out of them. You could even turn around and sell the crushed biochar as an inert soil additive to boost fertility.