For a bunch of geeks,/. is certainly full of shortsighted dimwittedness when it comes to space travel:
"It's too expensive. There's nothing to do there. We haven't solved the problems on earth. What if it doesn't work. The shuttle doesn't run Linux. Embedded sattelite OSs aren't aren't licensed under the GPL, etc."
Put your high-tech baby bottles away, quit whining, and look at the situation:
0) There is a vast universe out there, which we have not even scratched the surface of in terms of discovery.
1) We used to have the capability to _land another human being on a heavely body_. Mankind has dreamt about this for millenia. We have LOST it due to disuse and lack of further vision.
2) Someone (whatever you might feel about him on other issues) has actually put forth the vision and the resources to take us beyond our planet.
3) Just as any software needs a userbase to mature, the capability to move beyond our planet needs to have _real_ users (i.e., people living on the closest place to get to) if it has any chance of being developed.
4) Projects of this magnitude are the _ONLY_ way certain things we take for granted today can come into existence (sattelite communications, cell phones, digital watches, etc.) Even if the first colony were to fail, think about all the neat/useful stuff that MUST come out of such an endevaour. Otherwise, we're stuck waiting for the next generation PDA or graphics card as "innovation"
5) Without a base on the moon and the vision to go further, the same resources to be spent on this would be spent on buying staplers for some bureaucrat's office and reorganizing visionless initiatives.
AND YOU PEOPLE ARE STILL ASKING "WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?" You should be the ones helping spearhead the technology to make it possible...
Geeks of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your requirements telecons...
For a bunch of people who call themselves nerds, the/. crowd has certainly been short-sighted lately. Nerd!=whiner.
A compact ethanol to hydrogen reformer means that at least two of the the LARGEST problems stopping the adoption of hydrogen have been solved
1) Transportation:
The existing gasoline transport/storage/dissemination architecture can be used for ethanol
2) Net production of CO2
Until now, the cheapest ways to produce hydrogen have relized on fossil fuel consumption. Now hydrogen can be derived from biomass.
To everyone who complains about ethanol subsidies: corn is NOT the only way to make ethanol. You could probably find a way to ferment whatever is fastest growing--after all, this is not for human consumption.
I'm a fundamentalist Christian (i.e., I accept the Genesis account and everything else) with a Molecular Biology degree from a big 10 school. Seriously.
There's one significant fallacy that the anti-creationists are falling into here: Just because an idea (i.e., God created the Universe, the Earth, etc.) is defended by people who do not necessarily know what they are talking about doesn't invalidate the idea. It only invalidates the ideas of those particular defenders. A good example is the people (on my side of the fence)who try to invalidate the entire theory of evolution by "proving" that carbon dating is based on unsound principles. The fact that _they_ may be out of their element does not invalidate creation. (For that matter, the fact that we can observe certain evolutionary processes does not invalidate creation either--think about it!).
I shall not join in the ongoing troll about ID/big bang, etc. But notice this: whenever a modern-day scientist (or/.'er) encounters the idea that evolution is not how _we_ came to be, he will AUTOMATICALLY think the idea deserves 5 cuckoos, without looking at the evidence. This is about unscientific as not considering the math behind carbon dating because you once saw a counter-example.
What I'm saying is this: do not let the "cuckoos" on either side poison any hypothesis. Rather, evaluate the hypothesis on its own merits, using the scientific method.
An unhealthy attachment to the status quo will hinder scientific progress as much as following any crackpot idea that comes along...
I tell you what, our hits to eBay went down greatly when not everybody had a Web browser. For somebody whose job is filling out forms all day, invoicing and exporting, why do they need a Web browser? The idea that if you have 2,000 terminals they all have to have a Web browser, that's crazy. It just creates distractions.
-Do you think the freeloader mentality on the Internet is ready for change?
-I think it's at the turn of the hockey stick, because it's at about 15 percent of the Web population that's paying for content right now--that's still a low number. Very soon, you'll see that the content that's left to be free is content that will not be trusted; content that has a bias. Just like when you pick up a magazine that's free, and you don't trust it.
I will gladly pay that amount (and more) to get back to the moon.
Even if you care nothing about space (in which case you should promptly be kicked out of the/. brotherhood of geekdom), think about how much better everything can be done with today's technology--and what other cool gadgets might emerge from the effort.
And if that is not enough, try imagining a Beowulf cluster of those gadgets!!!
You just have to make sure that the content is indispensable.
I could see something like "please watch this annoying mortgage ad while load your bank account info..."
Might also work for links to highly coveted files.. . They really have to find an instutituon that doesn't mind ticking its customers off, though...otherwise, some advertising exec should start updating his resume right now!!
This may not be useful in the office, but when I'm flying, I almost never get to recharge my laptop. I would definitely buy & keep this around for those types of situations...now if I could only buy stock in the company...
Actually, I hope he wouldn't try too hard to prevent Technical Anachronisms...
I started reading Niven's early work in the 1970s, and loved it for the extrapolations of the technology at that time. The future of Niven is in places more charming than the real future...
Besides old, technically anachronistic science fiction gives really good insights into the hopes/fears of the time, as well as human short-sightedness.
A better question might be this: Larry, given that you have quite a bit of hindsight to draw on, which parts of our own science-fiction today will we regard as 'technically anachronistic' in 30 years?
The Integral Trees
on
Ask Larry Niven
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hi Larry,
I've always thought The Integral Trees and the Smoke Ring were the best visual imagery ever featured in a book, hard core sci-fi or otherwise.
Have you ever approached any moviemakers with the idea of making a feature-length film that takes place in a 0-G environment society such as the one in The Integral Trees? In a related note, do you think the special effects are up to par yet for this?
I, for one, would pay cold, hard cash to see the trilaterally symmetric fish, "ponds," foilage, and of course the trees themselves...
Your grandkids' PC will be made out of room temperature superconductors. The "CPU" will be a single chip containing a lattice of 1048576 10 Ghz processors. It will incorporate a quantum co-processor, qubit level hyperthreading, and 1024 Etabytes extratemporal random access storage.
However, due to the processing power required by Windows Authorized Edition (AE), JRE 25.0, and the GPU cycles required to render clippie in holographic hi-res, it will still take about a second between a menu-click and anything useful happening... (RMSLinux, however, will still run on old 486 SX machines...)
In a memo proposing to port UNIX to a new machine, Ritchie writes the following:
We do not plan that the C language be bootstrapped by means of a simple interpreter of an intermediate language; instead an acceptably efficient code generator must be written. The compiler will indeed be designed carefully so as to make changes easy, but for each new machine it will inevitably demand considerable skill even to decide on data representations and run-time conventions, let alone code sequences to be produced.
OK, maybe it's not exactly the same concept, but I still found it rather interesting...
Slashdot Mirror
For a bunch of geeks, /. is certainly full of shortsighted dimwittedness when it comes to space travel:
"It's too expensive. There's nothing to do there. We haven't solved the problems on earth. What if it doesn't work. The shuttle doesn't run Linux. Embedded sattelite OSs aren't aren't licensed under the GPL, etc."
Put your high-tech baby bottles away, quit whining, and look at the situation:
0) There is a vast universe out there, which we have not even scratched the surface of in terms of discovery.
1) We used to have the capability to _land another human being on a heavely body_. Mankind has dreamt about this for millenia. We have LOST it due to disuse and lack of further vision.
2) Someone (whatever you might feel about him on other issues) has actually put forth the vision and the resources to take us beyond our planet.
3) Just as any software needs a userbase to mature, the capability to move beyond our planet needs to have _real_ users (i.e., people living on the closest place to get to) if it has any chance of being developed.
4) Projects of this magnitude are the _ONLY_ way certain things we take for granted today can come into existence (sattelite communications, cell phones, digital watches, etc.) Even if the first colony were to fail, think about all the neat/useful stuff that MUST come out of such an endevaour. Otherwise, we're stuck waiting for the next generation PDA or graphics card as "innovation"
5) Without a base on the moon and the vision to go further, the same resources to be spent on this would be spent on buying staplers for some bureaucrat's office and reorganizing visionless initiatives.
AND YOU PEOPLE ARE STILL ASKING "WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?" You should be the ones helping spearhead the technology to make it possible...
Geeks of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your requirements telecons...
Right under the ad, there's a section called "Accessories We Recommend for This Item"...and the only reccomended accessory is:
Microsoft Trackball Optical
$29.96
Which you can order with your system from Wal-Mart.
For a bunch of people who call themselves nerds, the /. crowd has certainly been short-sighted lately. Nerd!=whiner.
A compact ethanol to hydrogen reformer means that at least two of the the LARGEST problems stopping the adoption of hydrogen have been solved
1) Transportation:
The existing gasoline transport/storage/dissemination architecture can be used for ethanol
2) Net production of CO2
Until now, the cheapest ways to produce hydrogen have relized on fossil fuel consumption. Now hydrogen can be derived from biomass.
To everyone who complains about ethanol subsidies: corn is NOT the only way to make ethanol. You could probably find a way to ferment whatever is fastest growing--after all, this is not for human consumption.
In summary, I hope this thing is for real...
I'm a fundamentalist Christian (i.e., I accept the Genesis account and everything else) with a Molecular Biology degree from a big 10 school. Seriously.
/.'er) encounters the idea that evolution is not how _we_ came to be, he will AUTOMATICALLY think the idea deserves 5 cuckoos, without looking at the evidence. This is about unscientific as not considering the math behind carbon dating because you once saw a counter-example.
There's one significant fallacy that the anti-creationists are falling into here: Just because an idea (i.e., God created the Universe, the Earth, etc.) is defended by people who do not necessarily know what they are talking about doesn't invalidate the idea. It only invalidates the ideas of those particular defenders. A good example is the people (on my side of the fence)who try to invalidate the entire theory of evolution by "proving" that carbon dating is based on unsound principles. The fact that _they_ may be out of their element does not invalidate creation. (For that matter, the fact that we can observe certain evolutionary processes does not invalidate creation either--think about it!).
I shall not join in the ongoing troll about ID/big bang, etc. But notice this: whenever a modern-day scientist (or
What I'm saying is this: do not let the "cuckoos" on either side poison any hypothesis. Rather, evaluate the hypothesis on its own merits, using the scientific method.
An unhealthy attachment to the status quo will hinder scientific progress as much as following any crackpot idea that comes along...
I never thought I'd be defending Windows...
I will gladly pay that amount (and more) to get back to the moon.
/. brotherhood of geekdom), think about how much better everything can be done with today's technology--and what other cool gadgets might emerge from the effort.
Even if you care nothing about space (in which case you should promptly be kicked out of the
And if that is not enough, try imagining a Beowulf cluster of those gadgets!!!
You just have to make sure that the content is indispensable.
I could see something like "please watch this annoying mortgage ad while load your bank account info..."
Might also work for links to highly coveted files.. . They really have to find an instutituon that doesn't mind ticking its customers off, though...otherwise, some advertising exec should start updating his resume right now!!
Look it up: tourism
Except in Soviet Russia!
%s/vi\./emacs\./g
:)
troll on
It will do exactly what it's intended to do--prevent their development!
</cynicism>
(I really hope not...I actually _would_ pay cold, hard cash for a device like this)
Expensive (in the US), but it doesn't get any more non-toxic than that....
to advise against redundancy...
to the Oil Industry.
Laptops and cell phones have already driven batteries to the point where they are useful in cars...
Just think about what the oil industry would do if you could run your electric car on locally made methanol (or ethanol)....
If they're smart, they'll keep this out of the market for as long as possible (watch for exploding fuel-cell laptop horror stories)
This may not be useful in the office, but when I'm flying, I almost never get to recharge my laptop. I would definitely buy & keep this around for those types of situations...now if I could only buy stock in the company ...
Larry,
:) )
What do you think of David Brin? Who are your favorite hard-core sci-fi authors (besides yourself, of course?
Actually, I hope he wouldn't try too hard to prevent Technical Anachronisms...
I started reading Niven's early work in the 1970s, and loved it for the extrapolations of the technology at that time. The future of Niven is in places more charming than the real future...
Besides old, technically anachronistic science fiction gives really good insights into the hopes/fears of the time, as well as human short-sightedness.
A better question might be this: Larry, given that you have quite a bit of hindsight to draw on, which parts of our own science-fiction today will we regard as 'technically anachronistic' in 30 years?
Hi Larry,
I've always thought The Integral Trees and the Smoke Ring were the best visual imagery ever featured in a book, hard core sci-fi or otherwise.
Have you ever approached any moviemakers with the idea of making a feature-length film that takes place in a 0-G environment society such as the one in The Integral Trees? In a related note, do you think the special effects are up to par yet for this?
I, for one, would pay cold, hard cash to see the trilaterally symmetric fish, "ponds," foilage, and of course the trees themselves...
In words that Intel is likely to be far from happy with.
Intel is a single entity, not a Star-Trek race.
Your grandkids' PC will be made out of room temperature superconductors. The "CPU" will be a single chip containing a lattice of 1048576 10 Ghz processors. It will incorporate a quantum co-processor, qubit level hyperthreading, and 1024 Etabytes extratemporal random access storage.
However, due to the processing power required by Windows Authorized Edition (AE), JRE 25.0, and the GPU cycles required to render clippie in holographic hi-res, it will still take about a second between a menu-click and anything useful happening... (RMSLinux, however, will still run on old 486 SX machines...)
-1 Troll
Oh wait, that was in the article :)
too bad they don't seem to have it online in mp3 format... (unless I didn't look carefully enough)
mail jules@xyz.com -s "th1s 1s
OK, maybe it's not exactly the same concept, but I still found it rather interesting...
Compiler geeks: flame away!