Eh what? Please excuse my ignorance, as I have only been following this casually, but. . . .
I thought it had been long shown that Todd Rider's paper doesn't address (i.e. is not applicable to) the Polywell device.
I seems to me that most critics of Polywell go off track when they start describing the ions in the reactor as a hot plasma (as if it were a kind of tokamak), when it would be more apt to view them as a converging particle beam. The type of directed (as opposed to random) kinetic energy those particles possess is not heat at all, from a thermodynamic standpoint. It has to be analyzed differently.
I had to laugh at the suggestion of Scheme. . . It's absurd for a whole long list of reasons. But then, I've never been a fan of the ivory tower "comp sci" approach to programming. Furthermore, scheme is NOT the "Latin" of computer languages. That distinction should go to C. (Then Objective C, C++, C#, Java, Vala and the rest of their ilk are the Romance Languages.)
A beginner's language shouldn't be too funky. Scheme is a list-processing language (a variant of LISP, in fact) which makes it fundamentally different from almost every other programming language that you're ever going to use for any practical purpose. As another example, I'd rule out Forth for similar reasons. A beginner should learn a procedural language, which means something from the (very large) family of BASIC/Pascal/C and their many descendents, et cetera.
A beginners language ought to have an editor and IDE that's easy to learn -- preferably buit-in, or installed with the language. Trying to learn with a generic text editor and a command line sucks. An easy API to do some interesting things with (more interesting than outputting ASCII text) is also a big plus. It shouldn't be GUI-oriented, though. That's just a big can of worms that a beginner doesn't need to open up yet.
A beginner's language shouldn't be OOP -- or at least, shouldn't push OOP in the programmer's face, the way Java does. If the OOP features are sort of hidden and won't bother anybody who doesn't want to mess with them, that's OK. But I can't state this strongly enough -- you shouldn't have to grasp the whole OOP concept (which doesn't come easily to many people) in order to start learning to program. It can and should come later. (Structured programming, on the other hand, should be there from day one.)
Despite all the hating on BASIC, it used to be pretty good at what it was designed for -- introducing beginners to programming. I'm excluding the early "sphaghetti code" versions of BASIC here, and I'm also sort of reluctantly excuding the newer GUI-OOP oriented versions of BASIC. BASIC has mutated a bit too much from its original mission.
However, I have very fond memories of GFA Basic on the old Atari ST -- it offered structured flow control (no line numbers) almost like Pascal, as well as a very friendly editor/IDE and inbuilt API -- but no OOP features. It met every one of the criteria that I outlined above, and it was great for learning. It was also a great stepping-stone to C, which was the next logical step in those days. It's just too bad, I don't see anything much like GFA Basic out there today.
I might suggest (as the author of TFA did) Python as the closest counterpart today. It's designed to be easy to learn (like BASIC was), it has OOP features but you can ignore them, and it appears that some pretty good IDEs and APIs (non-GUI!) are available for beginners to play around with. It's a bit of nuisance that you have to locate and install Python, then locate and install your IDE, then locate and install your chosen API. . . And the APIs like SDL and Pygame are more complicated to learn, I think, than doing graphics in GFA Basic ever was. . . But from what I can see, it's just about the closest modern equivalent.
I was told after years of refinement, all the problems with Linux had finally been worked out. It was now easy to install, easy to use. Grandma could now use it. The buzz was everywhere, it was finally going to be Year Of The Linux Desktop.
I'd given up my beloved Amiga, and I found that Windows seemed like a step backwards, so I was ready to try something different.
So, I got the latest release of the most popular distro -- that would have been about Red Hat 4.0, I reckon -- and installed it on my home-built PC.
I lost interest after I couldn't figure out how to change screen resolutions, and I couldn't get audio without recompiling a bunch of stuff.
I ended up buying one of those newfangled "iMac" things from Beleaguered Apple.
Re:facebook killed TV?
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 1
"Perhaps you would like to compare and contrast VHS with DVD. Or perhaps records versus CDs. .."
Bad comparison. DVD and LaserDisc (which was an analog format) had almost identical image quality, they both pushed what NTSC could handle. Also, the audio soundtrack on LDs (before they added digital audio) was encoded with CX noise reduction, and it came very close in quality to CD audio.
Analog doesn't have to be bad, and it's not automatic that digital is always better. Plus, LDs didn't have nonsense like region coding, encryption, trailers I was forced to watch, or "forbidden operations". . .
Is this a cruel joke?
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
From the article, "The second is Moore's Law, which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth. "
From where I sit, that sounds like a cruel joke, particularly when juxtaposed with news stories about how far behind the USA is in broadband penetration.
I've been on Wi-Fi for I forget how many years now (a decade at least?), during which time my computer has gone through a couple of replacement cycles and is now several times as fast. During that same time my internet bandwidth has increased not at all. (I tried DSL at one point, but it was no better.) So where is Moore's Law for bandwidth? I don't see it here.
I can't even watch a YouTube video without having to pause for buffering every once in a while. Is this supposed to be the replacement for my satellite TV? I have Dish Network with a tivo-like recorder and HD now, so it has arguably improved more during the last decade than anything on my computer.
Nor is there any immediate prospect for improvement on the computer side. I talked to my ISP about this. A couple of years ago the CEO was talking about going to Wi-Max, but wanted to wait until the technology was more standardized and proven. Now he's saying it's unaffordable, and it wouldn't help anyhow because the real bottleneck is his connection to the next regional hub.
The other thing to remember. . . For what it does -- distributing the same information to a large number of people -- broadcasting is several orders of magnitude more efficient than the internet can be, by the very nature of its design. It may have a smaller role, but broadcasting isn't going to disappear anytime soon.
Why would you need a 64-bit processor, or a 64-bit OS, on a netbook? And even if you did, would that make the OS footprint 10 times bigger? I don't see it.
Amiga OS 2.04 (my favorite version) comprised a 512K ROM and four 880K floppies. So there's the basics of a modern OS in 4 MB of data. That has become my benchmark for the size of an OS.
Now, a lot of people I know scoff at that. Today's OS has to do a lot more than Amiga OS ever did. Today's OS has to support OpenGL, Postscript, Java, video decoding, a HTML engine, not to mention you have to include an email client, a word processor, a browser. . . oh, and a TCP/IP stack, which Amiga OS didn't even have.
And that, they say, is why today's OS *can't* be smaller than about, let's say, 2000 MB. You just can't fit all that stuff into a space less than 500 times the size of Amiga OS, and you were foolish to ever imagine that anybody could.
And then I open up Slashdot and see this headline about the incredible shrinking OS. But, but. . . How can that be possible? They told me it can't shrink! They all said nobody could figure out how to make them smaller, you just have to learn to live with the gobsmacking huge OS.
And yet, now the netbook concept comes along (years if not decades overdue, in my view), and suddenly they can figure out how to make a fully functional Linux distro in only 200 MB (a mere 50 times the size of Amigs OS). My oh my, how the worm has turned.
For the people sending the ship, the ROI may be low. . . For the people riding on it, the ROI is incredibly high. They get a whole new star system of their very own, to do whatever they wish with it.
Free space optics has been around for a while, and cost has been more of a stumbling block than speed. I'd much rather have a 10 mb/s rig for $500, rather than the 1000 mb/s rigs companies are selling today for $50,000.
I've been interested in the Ronja project for a while, but it's very labor intensive to build and deploy. Somebody ought to commercialize it.
The CD is still arguably the best premium format for buying and collecting music. They can be made inexpensively, they're pretty durable, you get some artwork and liner notes (though not as good as with vinyl), they're reasonably compact, and the audio quality can be very high indeed when it's mastered right.
The mastering process has become the weak link, with the ongoing "loudness war" where dynamic range of music is routinely compressed all to Hell.
The attempt to introduce Super Audio CD and DVD Audio turned into a farce. First strike against them was the ridiculous format war. Second strike was the ridiculous DRM they were saddled with. Third strike was their dependence on superior audio quality to sell the product -- something most people couldn't even hear, and the rest of the industry didn't care about. (If they cared, we would never have got into the aforementioned loudness war.)
I was wondering exactly the same thing. In my view the Polywell is the most interesting thing going on in fusion research these days, and it's a direct descendent from the kinds of devices these hobbyists are building.
The original poster writes that this hypothesis is a threat to "human free will, in a very strong sense". I'm not sure what he means by a very strong sense, but it becomes clear after doing a little research that none of these people are talking about human free will in the sense that most people perceive it.
The real argument here is about whether the future is fixed. If the universe is purely mechanistic, then no agency -- human or otherwise -- can change the course of future events. But what does that mean for a human being?
Not much, it turns out. So you can't change the future, but thanks to the laws of thermodynamics you don't know what the future is going to be like anyhow. There's still nothing to prevent you from shaping (as opposed to changing) the future with your decisions.
But wait! Aren't those decisions also pre-determined? In a strictly physical sense, yes, they are. But again, what does that mean for us? Not much. A human being is a vastly complex and chaotic system interacting with a vastly complex and chaotic environment. We're driven by chaos theory and the laws of thermodynamics, not by quantum randomness. (Would you really want to be guided by quantum randomness? I mean seriously. . . What kind of "free will" would you get out of that?)
Any argument against free will -- in the way that most ordinary people regard it -- is easily brushed aside. For thousands of years we've been designing and creating things, making plans and then carrying them out. That's free will. To argue against it is like trying to prove that black is white (and then getting yourself killed at the next zebra crossing).
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd imagine some degree of binary compatibility -- or at the very least, the ability to run BASIC programs from the Apple II.
Apple II. . . Not the computer I personally would have chosen, I had an Atari 800XL which I would prefer any day. But then, the Atari had more proprietary, quirky stuff (custom graphics chips) which might have been a problem, and it had a more non-standard dialect of BASIC.
I live in a rural part of Texas. I haven't seen any wind turbines going up around here, but I have seen an awful lot of trucks hauling gigantic wind turbine components past my house.
I look forward to the day when we have wind turbines all over the state cranking out fuel for our cars. Umm. . . They do produce fuel for cars. . . somehow. . . right? Right??
Here's the problem with global warming. . . It's not so much the science as it is the agenda. To justify a radical agenda of emissions control, you have to build a house of cards:
1. the earth is warming 2. man-made CO2 emissions are causing it 3. the global effects will be extraordinarily severe 4. a reduction of CO2 emissions can mitigate those effects, in a manner causing substantially less harm than that which it averts
And it seems to me at as we move down this list we are getting onto more and more shaky ground with each step.
The most sensible analysis that I've read so far was Lomborg's "Cool It" book. He points out that everything has a cost, and you have to weigh those costs and set your priorities.
Too many environmentalists have failed to grasp that idea. In their philosophy, the Earth is teetering on the bring of destruction. Every possible scheme to try and avert this fate, no matter how extreme (and they are dreaming up more extreme ones all the time) must be pursued, and anybody who objects is labelled: denier, shill for the oil companies, ignorant, evil, creationist, etc.
From where I sit, it's the promoters of global warming hysteria who should be lumped into the same category with creationists. I have about equal contempt for both groups.
If the experiments they are conducting now prove successful, we could plausibly see the first power-generating demonstration plants inside of five years, not fifty.
Well, you've got a point there. . . I think that multiple solutions are going to compete in the marketplace, and it's going to take a while -- maybe decades -- for things to shake out.
And what I mean by shake out is. . . It may gradually emerge that one technology has clear advantages and the others wither away. That's what happened when automobiles were new. Electric cars, gasoline cars and steam cars competed on pretty near even terms, until gasoline cars finally gained an advantage big enough for the others to wither away. Something like that may happen again. Or. . . It may not, this time. My crystal ball is hazy.
So, how long do you reckon it'll take to get this SwiftFuel approved by the government, get it into mass industrial-scale production, get farmers all growing sorghum to feed it, and get everyone started using it? I'm guessing if our government launched an Apollo-style crash program to make it happen, and there were no unexpected snags, maybe five years. Since that is not going to happen, politically speaking, I think 10-15 years is more likely. And by your logic, anything that takes over a decade "WON'T WORK". Too bad.
Oil production in the USA peaked in the 1970s. The USA became a net oil importer in the 1970s. This problem has been brewing for 30 years while industry and government ignored it. There is not going to be any overnight solution. The scale of the problem is simply too huge.
My own feeling is that electric cars and plug-in hybrids are a better solution than biofuels. But you know, it could go either way. It's really all about who can bring their costs down and ramp up their production the fastest, not about which solution is more intellectually appealing.
I think you are on target with your general idea. Geothermal, nuclear and solar power are the obvious technologies that can scale up to actually solve our problems. But I have a couple of quibbles. . . . .
"Thermal energy is viable in only a few places in the world like Iceland." Big misconception there. A study not long ago from MIT concluded that enhanced geothermal has huge untapped potential and would be relatively quick and cheap to develop.
What they are doing today in Iceland and other geothermal plants around the world is tapping into "wet" geothermal formations that naturally produce live steam near the surface. Enhanced geothermal calls for drilling into hot, dry rocks, artificially fracturing them (that's the enhancement), and then pumping water through. Hot, dry rocks are available over widespread geographical areas. Some of them are pretty deep. . . But drillers have been going deeper and deeper after oil, so this is no longer a big stretch.
An enhanced geothermal plant is conceptually very much like a fission reactor -- assuming the reactor core was way down at the bottom of a well and never needs refueling. The Earth's core is your reactor.
"Nuclear uses finite resources and requires a lot of investment and still presents many, many environmental concerns." Many environmental concerns compared to what? Coal? Oh, well. . . This is something people will continue to fight over.
However. . . Nuclear fusion may be a lot closer than most people imagine. The late Dr. Bussard's team is still hard at work, they have built their newest test reactor, WB-7. Data should be available pretty soon to show whether this can work. I have my fingers crossed. Because if it does work, then power-generating fusion reactors might be five years away -- not fifty years as the tokamak guys usually say.
As for solar. . . A lot of money and research is going into solar. I'm optimistic about solar, but if you're going to criticize nuclear power then you'd better be willing to acknowledge solar's limitations as well. These fall into two general categories: cost, and intermittence. It's too expensive right now, and you have to make arrangements for those times when the sun isn't shining.
BTW, the National Space Society have begun promoting the idea of solar power satellites again, that would transmit their energy to the Earth using microwave beams. This was something NASA looked at in the 1970s but were never able to make the economics work out. Maybe the numbers would work out differently today, it might be worth another look.
Keep in mind that you can't put any of this stuff into the gas tank of your car. So we still need those electric cars and plug-in hybrids. That really should be job one, because there will always be lots of different ways to produce electricity.
We don't need to replace oil used for other things like plastic. Something like 70% to 80% (depending whose numbers you follow) of petroleum produced is burned as fuel in vehicles. Switch those vehicles to something other than petroleum fuels, then you would have plenty of oil left for: plastics, pharmaceuticals, solvents, paints, adhesives, asphalt, pesticides and so forth -- the whole petrochemical industry.
The far side of the moon could be the perfect place to build an array of radio telescopes. With the whole mass of the moon between the telescopes and the Earth, it would be well shielded from all the RF interference that our modern civilization sprays in all directions.
You are right that I haven't been in an arcade in a long time. I'm not even sure where I would find one within 100 miles of my home. But I wasn't talking about modern games, really. I was referring more to the "retro" or classic games. The costs with those are much lower, and you can afford to charge less per play.
However. . . Even a classic game still needs the basics: a sturdy cabinet, a monitor, a PSU, speakers, controls, etc. So they aren't dirt cheap, and to make them pay it would really help to get that $0.50 per game. The problem there is that everybody who remembers those old games with such fondness also remembers them being $0.25 per game.
I do think that coin-op games have probably gone the wrong direction -- in terms of trying to keep pace technologically with console and computer games, and trying to "wow" the players with technology and then charge a premium for it. That may work to some extent in the arcades where players have gone looking for a thrill . . . but the kind of "serious" players who would go to the arcade are probably the same ones who already have the latest consoles at home. Thus the arcades close their doors, one by one.
I feel like there still could be a niche for inexpensive coin-op games to be placed in convenience stores and cafes, like in the good old days. They would have to be simple and accessible games, not big-budget extravaganzas.
She didn't ask for a multi-game system, she would be happy with an original classic game, a refurbished or restored game, etc. There are a lot of old games available, and also a lot of old PCBs available that someone could (re)build a game around.
There are indeed commercially sold emulator cabinets with licensed ROMs. There are also commercially sold emulator cabinets (as well as bare JAMMA PCBs) with unlicensed ROMs. Caveat emptor!
In the early 1980s there were coin-op videogames all over the place. It seemed like every convenience store had one or two. Cafes and pizza parlors had them, corner grocery stores had them. Now they've mostly disappeared. In my town there's one burger joint that still has a few vandalized, worn-out and broken down games in the back room, and I think they've quit even turning on the power (which is just as well). I think the laundromat may have a couple too. That's all.
I'm building my own MAME cabinet just because I miss those games, and this is the only way I'll get to play them anymore. (Or play them properly, I should say. A mouse and keyboard just isn't the same.)
Arcade games have declined mostly due to home console games and inflation. Serious game players have gravitated toward sophisticated computer and console games -- that takes many hours to play. A lot of the old classic and popular (and profitable in their day) coin-op games were the sort we would now sneeringly dismiss as "casual games". As for inflation. . . The components that go into a game machine haven't changed much, they still cost money to build. Meanwhile the quarter you plunked into a Pac Man machine in 1980 would be worth about 55-60 cents in today's money. Yet, people remain resistant to the idea of putting in two coins for only one play.
And pinball? Same thing only worse. Pinball machines are more expensive and much harder to maintain, take up more space, and have, I would say, probably a more seedy image. People still like to play pinball, but the economics are working against it.
With regard to image. . . The lady who runs the local coffee shop heard about my MAME cabinet, and now tells me she wants a cocktail-table videogame for her shop. She wants a Ms Pacman, Lady Bug, Frogger, Donkey Kong, or Arkanoid. . . something nice like that, not a Defender or SF2T machine scaring people away. I doubt whether she'd accept an upright cabinet, and although I haven't mentioned it to her, I suspect a pinball machine is right out of the question (even if she could afford one, which is also out of the question).
Slashdot Mirror
Eh what? Please excuse my ignorance, as I have only been following this casually, but. . . .
I thought it had been long shown that Todd Rider's paper doesn't address (i.e. is not applicable to) the Polywell device.
I seems to me that most critics of Polywell go off track when they start describing the ions in the reactor as a hot plasma (as if it were a kind of tokamak), when it would be more apt to view them as a converging particle beam. The type of directed (as opposed to random) kinetic energy those particles possess is not heat at all, from a thermodynamic standpoint. It has to be analyzed differently.
I had to laugh at the suggestion of Scheme. . . It's absurd for a whole long list of reasons. But then, I've never been a fan of the ivory tower "comp sci" approach to programming. Furthermore, scheme is NOT the "Latin" of computer languages. That distinction should go to C. (Then Objective C, C++, C#, Java, Vala and the rest of their ilk are the Romance Languages.)
A beginner's language shouldn't be too funky. Scheme is a list-processing language (a variant of LISP, in fact) which makes it fundamentally different from almost every other programming language that you're ever going to use for any practical purpose. As another example, I'd rule out Forth for similar reasons. A beginner should learn a procedural language, which means something from the (very large) family of BASIC/Pascal/C and their many descendents, et cetera.
A beginners language ought to have an editor and IDE that's easy to learn -- preferably buit-in, or installed with the language. Trying to learn with a generic text editor and a command line sucks. An easy API to do some interesting things with (more interesting than outputting ASCII text) is also a big plus. It shouldn't be GUI-oriented, though. That's just a big can of worms that a beginner doesn't need to open up yet.
A beginner's language shouldn't be OOP -- or at least, shouldn't push OOP in the programmer's face, the way Java does. If the OOP features are sort of hidden and won't bother anybody who doesn't want to mess with them, that's OK. But I can't state this strongly enough -- you shouldn't have to grasp the whole OOP concept (which doesn't come easily to many people) in order to start learning to program. It can and should come later. (Structured programming, on the other hand, should be there from day one.)
Despite all the hating on BASIC, it used to be pretty good at what it was designed for -- introducing beginners to programming. I'm excluding the early "sphaghetti code" versions of BASIC here, and I'm also sort of reluctantly excuding the newer GUI-OOP oriented versions of BASIC. BASIC has mutated a bit too much from its original mission.
However, I have very fond memories of GFA Basic on the old Atari ST -- it offered structured flow control (no line numbers) almost like Pascal, as well as a very friendly editor/IDE and inbuilt API -- but no OOP features. It met every one of the criteria that I outlined above, and it was great for learning. It was also a great stepping-stone to C, which was the next logical step in those days. It's just too bad, I don't see anything much like GFA Basic out there today.
I might suggest (as the author of TFA did) Python as the closest counterpart today. It's designed to be easy to learn (like BASIC was), it has OOP features but you can ignore them, and it appears that some pretty good IDEs and APIs (non-GUI!) are available for beginners to play around with. It's a bit of nuisance that you have to locate and install Python, then locate and install your IDE, then locate and install your chosen API. . . And the APIs like SDL and Pygame are more complicated to learn, I think, than doing graphics in GFA Basic ever was. . . But from what I can see, it's just about the closest modern equivalent.
I remember everything leading up to it. . .
I was told after years of refinement, all the problems with Linux had finally been worked out. It was now easy to install, easy to use. Grandma could now use it. The buzz was everywhere, it was finally going to be Year Of The Linux Desktop.
I'd given up my beloved Amiga, and I found that Windows seemed like a step backwards, so I was ready to try something different.
So, I got the latest release of the most popular distro -- that would have been about Red Hat 4.0, I reckon -- and installed it on my home-built PC.
I lost interest after I couldn't figure out how to change screen resolutions, and I couldn't get audio without recompiling a bunch of stuff.
I ended up buying one of those newfangled "iMac" things from Beleaguered Apple.
"Perhaps you would like to compare and contrast VHS with DVD. Or perhaps records versus CDs. . ."
Bad comparison. DVD and LaserDisc (which was an analog format) had almost identical image quality, they both pushed what NTSC could handle. Also, the audio soundtrack on LDs (before they added digital audio) was encoded with CX noise reduction, and it came very close in quality to CD audio.
Analog doesn't have to be bad, and it's not automatic that digital is always better. Plus, LDs didn't have nonsense like region coding, encryption, trailers I was forced to watch, or "forbidden operations". . .
From the article, "The second is Moore's Law, which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth. "
From where I sit, that sounds like a cruel joke, particularly when juxtaposed with news stories about how far behind the USA is in broadband penetration.
I've been on Wi-Fi for I forget how many years now (a decade at least?), during which time my computer has gone through a couple of replacement cycles and is now several times as fast. During that same time my internet bandwidth has increased not at all. (I tried DSL at one point, but it was no better.) So where is Moore's Law for bandwidth? I don't see it here.
I can't even watch a YouTube video without having to pause for buffering every once in a while. Is this supposed to be the replacement for my satellite TV? I have Dish Network with a tivo-like recorder and HD now, so it has arguably improved more during the last decade than anything on my computer.
Nor is there any immediate prospect for improvement on the computer side. I talked to my ISP about this. A couple of years ago the CEO was talking about going to Wi-Max, but wanted to wait until the technology was more standardized and proven. Now he's saying it's unaffordable, and it wouldn't help anyhow because the real bottleneck is his connection to the next regional hub.
The other thing to remember. . . For what it does -- distributing the same information to a large number of people -- broadcasting is several orders of magnitude more efficient than the internet can be, by the very nature of its design. It may have a smaller role, but broadcasting isn't going to disappear anytime soon.
Why would you need a 64-bit processor, or a 64-bit OS, on a netbook? And even if you did, would that make the OS footprint 10 times bigger? I don't see it.
Amiga OS 2.04 (my favorite version) comprised a 512K ROM and four 880K floppies. So there's the basics of a modern OS in 4 MB of data. That has become my benchmark for the size of an OS.
Now, a lot of people I know scoff at that. Today's OS has to do a lot more than Amiga OS ever did. Today's OS has to support OpenGL, Postscript, Java, video decoding, a HTML engine, not to mention you have to include an email client, a word processor, a browser. . . oh, and a TCP/IP stack, which Amiga OS didn't even have.
And that, they say, is why today's OS *can't* be smaller than about, let's say, 2000 MB. You just can't fit all that stuff into a space less than 500 times the size of Amiga OS, and you were foolish to ever imagine that anybody could.
And then I open up Slashdot and see this headline about the incredible shrinking OS. But, but. . . How can that be possible? They told me it can't shrink! They all said nobody could figure out how to make them smaller, you just have to learn to live with the gobsmacking huge OS.
And yet, now the netbook concept comes along (years if not decades overdue, in my view), and suddenly they can figure out how to make a fully functional Linux distro in only 200 MB (a mere 50 times the size of Amigs OS). My oh my, how the worm has turned.
ROI for who?
For the people sending the ship, the ROI may be low. . . For the people riding on it, the ROI is incredibly high. They get a whole new star system of their very own, to do whatever they wish with it.
I cringe at all the comic-based movies. Comic books have been a creative ghetto for decades, and now movies can go the same place. This is progress?
However, I've also got to say. . . ELFQUEST, F*** YEAH!
It's just about 25 years overdue, IMO. But Hollywood will probably butcher it anyhow, as is their wont. (Is my cynicism showing?)
Free space optics has been around for a while, and cost has been more of a stumbling block than speed. I'd much rather have a 10 mb/s rig for $500, rather than the 1000 mb/s rigs companies are selling today for $50,000.
I've been interested in the Ronja project for a while, but it's very labor intensive to build and deploy. Somebody ought to commercialize it.
The CD is still arguably the best premium format for buying and collecting music. They can be made inexpensively, they're pretty durable, you get some artwork and liner notes (though not as good as with vinyl), they're reasonably compact, and the audio quality can be very high indeed when it's mastered right.
The mastering process has become the weak link, with the ongoing "loudness war" where dynamic range of music is routinely compressed all to Hell.
The attempt to introduce Super Audio CD and DVD Audio turned into a farce. First strike against them was the ridiculous format war. Second strike was the ridiculous DRM they were saddled with. Third strike was their dependence on superior audio quality to sell the product -- something most people couldn't even hear, and the rest of the industry didn't care about. (If they cared, we would never have got into the aforementioned loudness war.)
I was wondering exactly the same thing. In my view the Polywell is the most interesting thing going on in fusion research these days, and it's a direct descendent from the kinds of devices these hobbyists are building.
The original poster writes that this hypothesis is a threat to "human free will, in a very strong sense". I'm not sure what he means by a very strong sense, but it becomes clear after doing a little research that none of these people are talking about human free will in the sense that most people perceive it.
The real argument here is about whether the future is fixed. If the universe is purely mechanistic, then no agency -- human or otherwise -- can change the course of future events. But what does that mean for a human being?
Not much, it turns out. So you can't change the future, but thanks to the laws of thermodynamics you don't know what the future is going to be like anyhow. There's still nothing to prevent you from shaping (as opposed to changing) the future with your decisions.
But wait! Aren't those decisions also pre-determined? In a strictly physical sense, yes, they are. But again, what does that mean for us? Not much. A human being is a vastly complex and chaotic system interacting with a vastly complex and chaotic environment. We're driven by chaos theory and the laws of thermodynamics, not by quantum randomness. (Would you really want to be guided by quantum randomness? I mean seriously. . . What kind of "free will" would you get out of that?)
Any argument against free will -- in the way that most ordinary people regard it -- is easily brushed aside. For thousands of years we've been designing and creating things, making plans and then carrying them out. That's free will. To argue against it is like trying to prove that black is white (and then getting yourself killed at the next zebra crossing).
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd imagine some degree of binary compatibility -- or at the very least, the ability to run BASIC programs from the Apple II.
Apple II. . . Not the computer I personally would have chosen, I had an Atari 800XL which I would prefer any day. But then, the Atari had more proprietary, quirky stuff (custom graphics chips) which might have been a problem, and it had a more non-standard dialect of BASIC.
I live in a rural part of Texas. I haven't seen any wind turbines going up around here, but I have seen an awful lot of trucks hauling gigantic wind turbine components past my house.
I look forward to the day when we have wind turbines all over the state cranking out fuel for our cars. Umm. . . They do produce fuel for cars. . . somehow. . . right? Right??
Here's the problem with global warming. . . It's not so much the science as it is the agenda. To justify a radical agenda of emissions control, you have to build a house of cards:
1. the earth is warming
2. man-made CO2 emissions are causing it
3. the global effects will be extraordinarily severe
4. a reduction of CO2 emissions can mitigate those effects, in a manner causing substantially less harm than that which it averts
And it seems to me at as we move down this list we are getting onto more and more shaky ground with each step.
The most sensible analysis that I've read so far was Lomborg's "Cool It" book. He points out that everything has a cost, and you have to weigh those costs and set your priorities.
Too many environmentalists have failed to grasp that idea. In their philosophy, the Earth is teetering on the bring of destruction. Every possible scheme to try and avert this fate, no matter how extreme (and they are dreaming up more extreme ones all the time) must be pursued, and anybody who objects is labelled: denier, shill for the oil companies, ignorant, evil, creationist, etc.
From where I sit, it's the promoters of global warming hysteria who should be lumped into the same category with creationists. I have about equal contempt for both groups.
Not for much longer, I suspect. . .
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/06/latest-update-on-bussard-fusion.html
If the experiments they are conducting now prove successful, we could plausibly see the first power-generating demonstration plants inside of five years, not fifty.
Well, you've got a point there. . . I think that multiple solutions are going to compete in the marketplace, and it's going to take a while -- maybe decades -- for things to shake out.
And what I mean by shake out is. . . It may gradually emerge that one technology has clear advantages and the others wither away. That's what happened when automobiles were new. Electric cars, gasoline cars and steam cars competed on pretty near even terms, until gasoline cars finally gained an advantage big enough for the others to wither away. Something like that may happen again. Or. . . It may not, this time. My crystal ball is hazy.
will take over a decade != WON'T WORK
So, how long do you reckon it'll take to get this SwiftFuel approved by the government, get it into mass industrial-scale production, get farmers all growing sorghum to feed it, and get everyone started using it? I'm guessing if our government launched an Apollo-style crash program to make it happen, and there were no unexpected snags, maybe five years. Since that is not going to happen, politically speaking, I think 10-15 years is more likely. And by your logic, anything that takes over a decade "WON'T WORK". Too bad.
Oil production in the USA peaked in the 1970s. The USA became a net oil importer in the 1970s. This problem has been brewing for 30 years while industry and government ignored it. There is not going to be any overnight solution. The scale of the problem is simply too huge.
My own feeling is that electric cars and plug-in hybrids are a better solution than biofuels. But you know, it could go either way. It's really all about who can bring their costs down and ramp up their production the fastest, not about which solution is more intellectually appealing.
http://xkcd.com/386/
I think you are on target with your general idea. Geothermal, nuclear and solar power are the obvious technologies that can scale up to actually solve our problems. But I have a couple of quibbles. . . . .
"Thermal energy is viable in only a few places in the world like Iceland." Big misconception there. A study not long ago from MIT concluded that enhanced geothermal has huge untapped potential and would be relatively quick and cheap to develop.
What they are doing today in Iceland and other geothermal plants around the world is tapping into "wet" geothermal formations that naturally produce live steam near the surface. Enhanced geothermal calls for drilling into hot, dry rocks, artificially fracturing them (that's the enhancement), and then pumping water through. Hot, dry rocks are available over widespread geographical areas. Some of them are pretty deep. . . But drillers have been going deeper and deeper after oil, so this is no longer a big stretch.
An enhanced geothermal plant is conceptually very much like a fission reactor -- assuming the reactor core was way down at the bottom of a well and never needs refueling. The Earth's core is your reactor.
"Nuclear uses finite resources and requires a lot of investment and still presents many, many environmental concerns." Many environmental concerns compared to what? Coal? Oh, well. . . This is something people will continue to fight over.
However. . . Nuclear fusion may be a lot closer than most people imagine. The late Dr. Bussard's team is still hard at work, they have built their newest test reactor, WB-7. Data should be available pretty soon to show whether this can work. I have my fingers crossed. Because if it does work, then power-generating fusion reactors might be five years away -- not fifty years as the tokamak guys usually say.
As for solar. . . A lot of money and research is going into solar. I'm optimistic about solar, but if you're going to criticize nuclear power then you'd better be willing to acknowledge solar's limitations as well. These fall into two general categories: cost, and intermittence. It's too expensive right now, and you have to make arrangements for those times when the sun isn't shining.
BTW, the National Space Society have begun promoting the idea of solar power satellites again, that would transmit their energy to the Earth using microwave beams. This was something NASA looked at in the 1970s but were never able to make the economics work out. Maybe the numbers would work out differently today, it might be worth another look.
Keep in mind that you can't put any of this stuff into the gas tank of your car. So we still need those electric cars and plug-in hybrids. That really should be job one, because there will always be lots of different ways to produce electricity.
http://xkcd.com/386/
We don't need to replace oil used for other things like plastic. Something like 70% to 80% (depending whose numbers you follow) of petroleum produced is burned as fuel in vehicles. Switch those vehicles to something other than petroleum fuels, then you would have plenty of oil left for: plastics, pharmaceuticals, solvents, paints, adhesives, asphalt, pesticides and so forth -- the whole petrochemical industry.
http://xkcd.com/386/
The far side of the moon could be the perfect place to build an array of radio telescopes. With the whole mass of the moon between the telescopes and the Earth, it would be well shielded from all the RF interference that our modern civilization sprays in all directions.
You are right that I haven't been in an arcade in a long time. I'm not even sure where I would find one within 100 miles of my home. But I wasn't talking about modern games, really. I was referring more to the "retro" or classic games. The costs with those are much lower, and you can afford to charge less per play.
However. . . Even a classic game still needs the basics: a sturdy cabinet, a monitor, a PSU, speakers, controls, etc. So they aren't dirt cheap, and to make them pay it would really help to get that $0.50 per game. The problem there is that everybody who remembers those old games with such fondness also remembers them being $0.25 per game.
I do think that coin-op games have probably gone the wrong direction -- in terms of trying to keep pace technologically with console and computer games, and trying to "wow" the players with technology and then charge a premium for it. That may work to some extent in the arcades where players have gone looking for a thrill . . . but the kind of "serious" players who would go to the arcade are probably the same ones who already have the latest consoles at home. Thus the arcades close their doors, one by one.
I feel like there still could be a niche for inexpensive coin-op games to be placed in convenience stores and cafes, like in the good old days. They would have to be simple and accessible games, not big-budget extravaganzas.
She didn't ask for a multi-game system, she would be happy with an original classic game, a refurbished or restored game, etc. There are a lot of old games available, and also a lot of old PCBs available that someone could (re)build a game around.
There are indeed commercially sold emulator cabinets with licensed ROMs. There are also commercially sold emulator cabinets (as well as bare JAMMA PCBs) with unlicensed ROMs. Caveat emptor!
In the early 1980s there were coin-op videogames all over the place. It seemed like every convenience store had one or two. Cafes and pizza parlors had them, corner grocery stores had them. Now they've mostly disappeared. In my town there's one burger joint that still has a few vandalized, worn-out and broken down games in the back room, and I think they've quit even turning on the power (which is just as well). I think the laundromat may have a couple too. That's all.
I'm building my own MAME cabinet just because I miss those games, and this is the only way I'll get to play them anymore. (Or play them properly, I should say. A mouse and keyboard just isn't the same.)
Arcade games have declined mostly due to home console games and inflation. Serious game players have gravitated toward sophisticated computer and console games -- that takes many hours to play. A lot of the old classic and popular (and profitable in their day) coin-op games were the sort we would now sneeringly dismiss as "casual games". As for inflation. . . The components that go into a game machine haven't changed much, they still cost money to build. Meanwhile the quarter you plunked into a Pac Man machine in 1980 would be worth about 55-60 cents in today's money. Yet, people remain resistant to the idea of putting in two coins for only one play.
And pinball? Same thing only worse. Pinball machines are more expensive and much harder to maintain, take up more space, and have, I would say, probably a more seedy image. People still like to play pinball, but the economics are working against it.
With regard to image. . . The lady who runs the local coffee shop heard about my MAME cabinet, and now tells me she wants a cocktail-table videogame for her shop. She wants a Ms Pacman, Lady Bug, Frogger, Donkey Kong, or Arkanoid. . . something nice like that, not a Defender or SF2T machine scaring people away. I doubt whether she'd accept an upright cabinet, and although I haven't mentioned it to her, I suspect a pinball machine is right out of the question (even if she could afford one, which is also out of the question).