Difficult but far more workable than flying cars would be to build mixed industrial/residential/commercial/agricultural cities where people can work, eat, rest, recreate and procreate without commuting and where the resources need for those activities don't need to be transported vast distances.
Build smaller cities, not megapolises like New York, surrounded by farms and factories. If pollution is an issue, power sources with a poor "green energy" reputation can be located further off, the electricity being brought in by long-distance power lines. That or the usual mix of solar, wind or other zero-emission power sources.
How can Paul Ryan be a Neocon when he's Catholic, just like the most famous Democratic president JFK? Never mind the Vatican, American Catholics tend to be middle of the road in most things, including evolution and birth control except when it comes to abortion. So unless the OP can prove Ryan is Opus Dei, then I'd say he's just as moderate, perhaps even more moderate than healthcare Romney.
Don't count out the non-believers or believers of alternative religions who might be tempted into buying such an evil-sounding website name. Might also work for a hardcore gamer's site.
You're right of course. But Ellison's over a decade older than Jobs and Gates. So while Apple, Microsoft and Oracle were all founded in the 70s, Ellison presumably had more business and real life experience than Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg when he started his company. If I'm not mistaken Jobs even hired Scully the softdrinks salesman to run Apple for a while since outside investors thought Jobs was too brash and young to run Apple, much as Eric Schmidt was hired as Google CEO while the co-founders got schooled in corporate hard knocks.
"At least in the Big Company I come from, you aren't considered any kind of "executive" unless you have some kind of "* Vice President" or "C*" in your title."
So does being a "C/C#/C++ Programmer" make you some kind of big shot?
Facebook's biggest problem as a young company is Zuckerberg has never had a corporate alter ego. The most prominent of the newer information companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google were started by partners such as Steve Jobs/Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates/Paul Allen, and Larry Page/Sergey Brin. Like a vanishing twin, one of the partners might eventually leave the company, but in their early histories, none of these companies was dominated by a single alpha-geek but by a Batman and Robin or Laurel and Hardy dynamic duo.
"Actually the biggest reason we don't all vote on every last issue is that we can't all live in one city and meet in one place. The Internet fixes that problem."
Yes, I think it's time we move on to direct democracy. We've had the technology to do so for at least a decade. The effect of any fraud or vote manipulation can fixed by making the voting on critical issues more frequent. It should be possible to generate a trend that would make a sudden spike in say pro/anti gun/copyright/etc votes suspicious, unless it's tied to a major event.
Decisions should be reversible with a reasonable grace period for older decisions to be implemented before they are revoked. Let's say a majority decide to ban the sale of all firearms except for low-caliber handguns. The decision takes effect for four months before another vote is taken, which might reverse it. Safeguards should be in place that woudl require multiple consecutive votes or a cooling off period before critical decisions like the declaration of war or the revocation of a consitutional provision.
In our direct voting scenario, the president will be effectively a bureaucrat that merely implement decisions, thereby preventing government paralysis via "micro" management. Naturally such a president can also be impeached and removed from office for failing to do his job.
+1 for color photos. This at least would help settle the question of the color of the sky over Mars. Most depictions including sci-fi movies I've seen of the Martian sky show it red rather than blue, which is the sort of sky one would expect to see from a sun-like star. The red is supposed to be caused by pollution like rusty dust storms or during sunrise/sunset.
"Named after the placebo effect, it's the term for when patient expectations do harm, rather than good."
With other news about Nokia selling out to a patent troll and Google patenting a 'Net-based OS, I thought this was yet another article about patents: "It's the term for when *patent* expectations do harm, rather than good." Mabye our patent system is in dire need of a cure?
At the moment I'd say a better application as well as test of this technology is to send it to Mars as part of a rover that can cruise faster than snail speed. If the rover can stay upright for a year while traversing at least 50,000 miles of rough terrain, then I'm sold. I'd say it would be the ideal test since you can't possibly kill anything in an accident in Mars. GPS, radiation and shock proofing needed of course.
"A fine of £14 million is pocket money to them - just operating overhead. If the government wants to moderate Google's behaviour (besides just pretending to want to) then they would fine them far, far more."
A fine thought, however, think of the consequences of say fining Google a £/$1 billion for an offense that hasn't harmed much less killed any kittens. This would jack up the liabilities of companies that do real harm like an oil spill or a nuclear radiation leak. So what do your propose? A government takeover since there's no way such a company can pay a multitrillion £/$ fine?
I say fine the company a fair amount but then order them to fix the problem and repair the damages along with a threat for more drastic action if it fails to implement the court order. This is besides making good on the actual damages including sickness/lost revenue/etc, which are a separate matter.
You can't modify human behavior if you send every offender to death or condemn businesses to a similar fate for offenses that don't merit such harsh treatment.
Why can't they be more like Larry Ewing, author of the most famous open source logo of them all, that fat dodo that looks like Homer Simpson after eating a school of tuna? I can understand Redhat and Canonical defending their logos to prevent third parties selling Trojaned or crapwared copies, but aren't the open source and the open hard movements distributing ideas, and the more viral the logos go, the popular their ideas become?
A couple hundred years and some extra technology isn't going to change us on a fundemental level.
That's because we haven't evolved into another species yet. We're still that same hairless ape that trudged out of Africa a few hundred thousand years ago. War, love, and politics: these are things we inherited from our simian ancestors. Just watch any science documentary about chimps, our presumably nearest relatives as a species. But expect human nature to change when humanity turns from organic to inorganci. What I hate about Star Trek and Babylon 5 is how the Terrans are still flesh-and-blood humans that can still age and die, even if they have already conquered the speed of light, a far more daunting feat than achieving immortality. Far future space fiction is by its very nature escapist. If a you want socially realistic sci-fi, write cyberpunk or near future sci-fi that doesn't stray beyond Green Mars.
When you don't own your stack, your 'partner' can quickly become your competitor.
Manufacturers selling Android devices already own the software stack, except for the usual "proprietary" drivers which third parties own no matter what platform. Google's initial advantage, should it start manufacturing Android devices in-house rather than simply co-branding with companies like Samsung and HTC, is the Google app store. OEMs that want to continue along the Android route should develop their own mini-app stores as a back-up plan should Google become Evil and deliberately introduce model-incompatible changes to the app store. Alternatively, they could partner with the likes of Amazon, which already has an app store. If the future is really in the Cloud, then owning the software stack that runs on a device isn't enough.
NOBODY in their right mind seriously thinks they can accurately predict the future. That said, it should be possible to extrapolate the future from present trends. A good sci-fi writer wouldn't have predicted flying cars because they're either so damn impractical or if possible engineering-wise indistinguishable from airplanes.
Reading near-future hard sci-fi, it's also important to keep in mind cultural and political differences. Heinlein's Libertarian vision of robber barons on the Moon differs markedly from Clarke's vision of continued government-sponsored space exploration, influenced no doubt by the British Empire's own exploratory conquests of the New World and Australia. Each is as likely or unlikely as the other. The decisive factor isn't technology but future political developments.
The main questions there are whether it's technologically plausible or feasible for us, either by biological enhancement such as those described by Ray Kurzweil, or by some combination of biological enhancement and uploading our minds onto computers in the future.
The key to achieving immortality is the liberation of information from the media that contains it. For this reason, genes are "practically" immortal because they survive the death of their host cell. I say "practically" immortal because I doubt whether genes would survive the big crunch or whatever comes after the heat death of the universe.
Some might argue that genes aren't anywhere near immortal because they mutate, thus producing evolution. This assumes a definition of immortality predicated on organic consistency, gods or demons that behave and even look in a consistently recognizable fashion. But why should "immutability" be considered a part of the definition, when we ourselves are NOT the same persons as the babies that were born two to four or more decades ago?
Mentally and physically the person in my baby picture is already dead. But somehow most people would insist that that baby is me!
So genes are already immortal up to the death of the universe or the explosion of the sun, where no Terran species manages to propagate itself across the galaxy. The problem then for the would-be transhumanist is to achieve the immortality of what Freud referred to as the Ego.
And this has already been partly achieved. Through books and other works of the human mind. The transmission isn't perfect, of course, but it should be possible to recreate a tiny bit of the consciousness of a diarist like Anne Frank as she lived during the Nazi domination of Europe.
Now imagine if a modern Anne Frank managed to secretly blog or tweet about her daily, even hourly experiences. A female teenage reader of her blog should be able to experience vicariously the joys and heartaches of Anne Frank, especially if that other girl lives under similar circumstances, with caring family and friends under a repressive government. Now if we extend this thought experiment with the use of wearable audiovisual recording equipment like Google Glass, we can have a practical substitute for the sensory input that produces memory. A person can effectively brainwash herself, or even himself, into becoming Anne Frank.
As memory and perception tends to be selective, we don't need to wear our Google Glasses to the toilet or in bed to record the essential experiences of another person, and to vicariously live that person's life. Omitting the repetitious bedtime/breakfast business should eliminate over half the data storage requirements of a life blog, leaving perhaps only sex as the great unknown.
In case you just want to try out the game engine, the download page has links to some freeware games and demos, including Beneath a Steel Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen. Both are relatively large, fully playable games. Both games date from the mid-90s, so "large" is relative here to floppy disks rather than number of DVDs needed to pirate the game.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles), Nintendo Wii sold more units than both Xbox and Xbox 360. While Xbox 360 outsold Sony Playstation 3 by a few million units, combined sales of all Playstation models are several times higher than sales of both Xbox models. So what makes you say that Microsoft is the number one console manufacturer?
Moreover, unlike sales of smartphones and tablets, sales of game consoles are stagnating already. So it's pointless to argue whether Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony is the No. 1 or coolest console manufacturer.
Failed? OEMs were the key to Microsoft's success! Much more than developers, developers, developers. That's why Microsoft was a bigger company than Apple for most of its history. For OEMs Microsoft was a benevolent dictator. Now Microsoft is a desperate despot willing to sacrifice its allies just to maintain its position as an influential tech company.
Microsoft is only brilliant in the short-term. If they do this enough times, sooner or later they either encounter another big bully or piss off enough of the little kids they'll have a rebellion on their hands. Short-term profits, but long-term Microsoft could be generating so much ill-will that people would prefer not to do business with them unless absolutely necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Difficult but far more workable than flying cars would be to build mixed industrial/residential/commercial/agricultural cities where people can work, eat, rest, recreate and procreate without commuting and where the resources need for those activities don't need to be transported vast distances.
Build smaller cities, not megapolises like New York, surrounded by farms and factories. If pollution is an issue, power sources with a poor "green energy" reputation can be located further off, the electricity being brought in by long-distance power lines. That or the usual mix of solar, wind or other zero-emission power sources.
How can Paul Ryan be a Neocon when he's Catholic, just like the most famous Democratic president JFK? Never mind the Vatican, American Catholics tend to be middle of the road in most things, including evolution and birth control except when it comes to abortion. So unless the OP can prove Ryan is Opus Dei, then I'd say he's just as moderate, perhaps even more moderate than healthcare Romney.
Don't count out the non-believers or believers of alternative religions who might be tempted into buying such an evil-sounding website name. Might also work for a hardcore gamer's site.
You're right of course. But Ellison's over a decade older than Jobs and Gates. So while Apple, Microsoft and Oracle were all founded in the 70s, Ellison presumably had more business and real life experience than Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg when he started his company. If I'm not mistaken Jobs even hired Scully the softdrinks salesman to run Apple for a while since outside investors thought Jobs was too brash and young to run Apple, much as Eric Schmidt was hired as Google CEO while the co-founders got schooled in corporate hard knocks.
"At least in the Big Company I come from, you aren't considered any kind of "executive" unless you have some kind of "* Vice President" or "C*" in your title."
So does being a "C/C#/C++ Programmer" make you some kind of big shot?
No, it compiles toa single 1.5GB C++ binary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Technical_aspects
Facebook's biggest problem as a young company is Zuckerberg has never had a corporate alter ego. The most prominent of the newer information companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google were started by partners such as Steve Jobs/Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates/Paul Allen, and Larry Page/Sergey Brin. Like a vanishing twin, one of the partners might eventually leave the company, but in their early histories, none of these companies was dominated by a single alpha-geek but by a Batman and Robin or Laurel and Hardy dynamic duo.
"Actually the biggest reason we don't all vote on every last issue is that we can't all live in one city and meet in one place. The Internet fixes that problem."
Yes, I think it's time we move on to direct democracy. We've had the technology to do so for at least a decade. The effect of any fraud or vote manipulation can fixed by making the voting on critical issues more frequent. It should be possible to generate a trend that would make a sudden spike in say pro/anti gun/copyright/etc votes suspicious, unless it's tied to a major event.
Decisions should be reversible with a reasonable grace period for older decisions to be implemented before they are revoked. Let's say a majority decide to ban the sale of all firearms except for low-caliber handguns. The decision takes effect for four months before another vote is taken, which might reverse it. Safeguards should be in place that woudl require multiple consecutive votes or a cooling off period before critical decisions like the declaration of war or the revocation of a consitutional provision.
In our direct voting scenario, the president will be effectively a bureaucrat that merely implement decisions, thereby preventing government paralysis via "micro" management. Naturally such a president can also be impeached and removed from office for failing to do his job.
+1 for color photos. This at least would help settle the question of the color of the sky over Mars. Most depictions including sci-fi movies I've seen of the Martian sky show it red rather than blue, which is the sort of sky one would expect to see from a sun-like star. The red is supposed to be caused by pollution like rusty dust storms or during sunrise/sunset.
"Named after the placebo effect, it's the term for when patient expectations do harm, rather than good."
With other news about Nokia selling out to a patent troll and Google patenting a 'Net-based OS, I thought this was yet another article about patents: "It's the term for when *patent* expectations do harm, rather than good." Mabye our patent system is in dire need of a cure?
At the moment I'd say a better application as well as test of this technology is to send it to Mars as part of a rover that can cruise faster than snail speed. If the rover can stay upright for a year while traversing at least 50,000 miles of rough terrain, then I'm sold. I'd say it would be the ideal test since you can't possibly kill anything in an accident in Mars. GPS, radiation and shock proofing needed of course.
"A fine of £14 million is pocket money to them - just operating overhead. If the government wants to moderate Google's behaviour (besides just pretending to want to) then they would fine them far, far more."
A fine thought, however, think of the consequences of say fining Google a £/$1 billion for an offense that hasn't harmed much less killed any kittens. This would jack up the liabilities of companies that do real harm like an oil spill or a nuclear radiation leak. So what do your propose? A government takeover since there's no way such a company can pay a multitrillion £/$ fine?
I say fine the company a fair amount but then order them to fix the problem and repair the damages along with a threat for more drastic action if it fails to implement the court order. This is besides making good on the actual damages including sickness/lost revenue/etc, which are a separate matter.
You can't modify human behavior if you send every offender to death or condemn businesses to a similar fate for offenses that don't merit such harsh treatment.
Why can't they be more like Larry Ewing, author of the most famous open source logo of them all, that fat dodo that looks like Homer Simpson after eating a school of tuna? I can understand Redhat and Canonical defending their logos to prevent third parties selling Trojaned or crapwared copies, but aren't the open source and the open hard movements distributing ideas, and the more viral the logos go, the popular their ideas become?
That's because we haven't evolved into another species yet. We're still that same hairless ape that trudged out of Africa a few hundred thousand years ago. War, love, and politics: these are things we inherited from our simian ancestors. Just watch any science documentary about chimps, our presumably nearest relatives as a species. But expect human nature to change when humanity turns from organic to inorganci. What I hate about Star Trek and Babylon 5 is how the Terrans are still flesh-and-blood humans that can still age and die, even if they have already conquered the speed of light, a far more daunting feat than achieving immortality. Far future space fiction is by its very nature escapist. If a you want socially realistic sci-fi, write cyberpunk or near future sci-fi that doesn't stray beyond Green Mars.
Manufacturers selling Android devices already own the software stack, except for the usual "proprietary" drivers which third parties own no matter what platform. Google's initial advantage, should it start manufacturing Android devices in-house rather than simply co-branding with companies like Samsung and HTC, is the Google app store. OEMs that want to continue along the Android route should develop their own mini-app stores as a back-up plan should Google become Evil and deliberately introduce model-incompatible changes to the app store. Alternatively, they could partner with the likes of Amazon, which already has an app store. If the future is really in the Cloud, then owning the software stack that runs on a device isn't enough.
NOBODY in their right mind seriously thinks they can accurately predict the future. That said, it should be possible to extrapolate the future from present trends. A good sci-fi writer wouldn't have predicted flying cars because they're either so damn impractical or if possible engineering-wise indistinguishable from airplanes.
Reading near-future hard sci-fi, it's also important to keep in mind cultural and political differences. Heinlein's Libertarian vision of robber barons on the Moon differs markedly from Clarke's vision of continued government-sponsored space exploration, influenced no doubt by the British Empire's own exploratory conquests of the New World and Australia. Each is as likely or unlikely as the other. The decisive factor isn't technology but future political developments.
The key to achieving immortality is the liberation of information from the media that contains it. For this reason, genes are "practically" immortal because they survive the death of their host cell. I say "practically" immortal because I doubt whether genes would survive the big crunch or whatever comes after the heat death of the universe.
Some might argue that genes aren't anywhere near immortal because they mutate, thus producing evolution. This assumes a definition of immortality predicated on organic consistency, gods or demons that behave and even look in a consistently recognizable fashion. But why should "immutability" be considered a part of the definition, when we ourselves are NOT the same persons as the babies that were born two to four or more decades ago?
Mentally and physically the person in my baby picture is already dead. But somehow most people would insist that that baby is me!
So genes are already immortal up to the death of the universe or the explosion of the sun, where no Terran species manages to propagate itself across the galaxy. The problem then for the would-be transhumanist is to achieve the immortality of what Freud referred to as the Ego.
And this has already been partly achieved. Through books and other works of the human mind. The transmission isn't perfect, of course, but it should be possible to recreate a tiny bit of the consciousness of a diarist like Anne Frank as she lived during the Nazi domination of Europe.
Now imagine if a modern Anne Frank managed to secretly blog or tweet about her daily, even hourly experiences. A female teenage reader of her blog should be able to experience vicariously the joys and heartaches of Anne Frank, especially if that other girl lives under similar circumstances, with caring family and friends under a repressive government. Now if we extend this thought experiment with the use of wearable audiovisual recording equipment like Google Glass, we can have a practical substitute for the sensory input that produces memory. A person can effectively brainwash herself, or even himself, into becoming Anne Frank.
As memory and perception tends to be selective, we don't need to wear our Google Glasses to the toilet or in bed to record the essential experiences of another person, and to vicariously live that person's life. Omitting the repetitious bedtime/breakfast business should eliminate over half the data storage requirements of a life blog, leaving perhaps only sex as the great unknown.
In case you just want to try out the game engine, the download page has links to some freeware games and demos, including Beneath a Steel Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen. Both are relatively large, fully playable games. Both games date from the mid-90s, so "large" is relative here to floppy disks rather than number of DVDs needed to pirate the game.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles), Nintendo Wii sold more units than both Xbox and Xbox 360. While Xbox 360 outsold Sony Playstation 3 by a few million units, combined sales of all Playstation models are several times higher than sales of both Xbox models. So what makes you say that Microsoft is the number one console manufacturer?
Moreover, unlike sales of smartphones and tablets, sales of game consoles are stagnating already. So it's pointless to argue whether Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony is the No. 1 or coolest console manufacturer.
Failed? OEMs were the key to Microsoft's success! Much more than developers, developers, developers. That's why Microsoft was a bigger company than Apple for most of its history. For OEMs Microsoft was a benevolent dictator. Now Microsoft is a desperate despot willing to sacrifice its allies just to maintain its position as an influential tech company.
Microsoft is only brilliant in the short-term. If they do this enough times, sooner or later they either encounter another big bully or piss off enough of the little kids they'll have a rebellion on their hands. Short-term profits, but long-term Microsoft could be generating so much ill-will that people would prefer not to do business with them unless absolutely necessary.