The paper appears to shoot down any chance of an IEC fusion reactor producing useful energy outputs. This paper has been around for a while and is one reason why so few people are interested in IEC (or similar systems) these days. I'm not qualified to follow the scientific argument, but I'd love to know whether Dr. Bussard can answer it.
Bussard has conducted an experiment which he believes was successful. He has proposed funding a repeat of the experiment, with better instrumentation, followed by a review panel to assess its meaning and potential. That sounds like science to me. If nobody in the world is willing to put up the funding needed to verify it, that's a failure of science.
I think we're mixing up two different meanings of the word "theory". When we speak of "string theory" we aren't talking about a specific scientific theory (as in theory of gravity, etc.). . . We're talking about a field of theoretical (as opposed to experimental) study.
Put another way. . . The "Theory of Evolution" is what Charles Darwin came up with. "Evolution Theory" is the field of study that was spawned from it. In the case of strings, we have "String Theory" as a field of study, but it hasn't yet produced a worthy "Theory of Strings" to enshrine in the scientific canon, and it's now looking highly questionable that it ever will.
Over on teslamotorsclub.com we did some back-of-envelope calculations and figured two of these EEStor units should fit into the same compartment where the Li-ion pack is currently housed in the Tesla Roadster, and each of them should store slightly more energy than the whole Li-ion pack -- meaning the car's range per charge could be slightly more than 500 miles.
So. . . There's your lightweight go-kart. Except it weighs about 500 pounds more than an Elise -- but it's still a very small two-seater car. How that would translate to a larger, four-door car is open to question.
The 500 mile range is a particularly important milestone to reach, since that's the maximum distance many people (including myself) are inclined to drive during a day. If you can literally drive all day and charge at night (perhaps at a motel?), then the whole "fast charging" issue becomes a non-issue. Nobody cares how long an overnight charge takes as long as it's done overnight.
I want to point out that EEStor have not made any "outrageous claims" at all. They've filed a patent, they've inked a deal with Feel Good Cars. . . And otherwise they've kept very quiet: they don't give interviews, they don't even have a website, and they try to discourage papers from writing about them. All the breathless talk that's been flying about their product is rumor. It's all claims that people have distilled out of the patent or wheedled out of "anonymous insiders" who claim to be in the loop.
The word "nanotechnology" has truly lost all meaning.
Back in the 1980s we (and by "we" I mean people who read Engines of Creation) knew what nanotechnology meant: molecular-scale, atomically precise machines, robots, and things built by them. It meant nanomachines with gears, levers, motors, processors, power storage, etc. We dared hoped by this time (2006) the technology just might have come to fruition. So. . . What did we get instead? We got people slapping the "nanotechnology" label on any kind of material with small particles, in the hopes that investors will then shower them with money. If real nanotechnology ever appears, we'll have to figure out a new name for it.
Yes, the IBM PC changed the world -- very much for the worse.
Before it came along there was a flourishing ecosystem of computer platforms: Tandy, Texas Instruments, Sinclair, Acorn, Commodore, Atari, Apple and several others. Then IBM came along and simply wiped them all out. Some (Atari and Commodore) straggled and survived longer than others, and Apple was never quite killed off completely, but we were nonetheless left with a tremendously impoverished environment.
And I still don't really understand how it happened.
In 1982 I got a new computer -- an Atari 800XL for $250 plus a floppy drive for $400. Just about the same time my high school bought some new IBM PCs. Both systems came with BASIC and were capable of performing many of the same kinds of tasks. My Atari had full color graphics and some decent sound effects. The IBMs had green text displays and a buzzer, and each of them cost several times as much as my Atari. (Now in retrospect, the fact that the IBMs were built like tanks and were unsuited to playing games surely must have looked like big advantages from the school's standpoint.)
It didn't make right good sense to me. After the IBM PC was introduced, the speed with which it took over the marketplace was dizzying. It seems like it was less than a year before people were talking about the IBM PC as the "de facto standard", and all the previously established platforms (Commodore, Atari, TI) and their associated software were vanishing from store shelves. Sitting here with my very nifty Atari system, I had no idea why it was happening -- certainly nobody had asked my opinion on the subject. From my viewpoint the IBM PC had nothing interesting to offer.
Later I worked my way through an Atari 520ST, Amiga 2000/2500, Amiga 3000T, Amiga 4000. . . Atari and Amiga were the hot platforms for games, while PCs were still puttering along with 8/16 bit processors, unusable GUIs (if any at all), CGI graphics, and mere buzzers for sound. And yet. . . Ease of use, excellent graphics and sound, low prices and raw speed were no avail against the flood of PClones. Once again, I didn't understand. Why did so many people seem stupid about this?
After the Amiga platform pretty much died, I put together a generic 90MHz Pentium Win95, which was a disaster. I later rebuilt it as a 233 MHz AMD Win98 system, which was slightly less a disaster, but that was really the Dark Age of my computer experiences. It was the only computer I've ever owned that I've fundamentally disliked.
After that it was iMac DV (nice hardware, too bad about Mac OS 8/9), then Mac OS X and Power Mac G4, Power Mac G5, and I was mostly happy again. But from where I sit, it still seems like everything good we have in the computer world today -- everything -- has come in spite of the IBM PC platform and Microsoft, not because of them.
By that measure, Microsoft has improved Windows by a far greater degree. In the same time frame, it has shipped Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional Edition, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (and 2005 UR2), Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, Windows XP Home and Professional N Editions, Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2, absolutely a big Windows upgrade), Windows XP Embedded, Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, and Windows XP Starter Edition in various languages.
Setting aside the tablet and embedded stuff. . . All this different "editions" of XP are not something I would brag about. Am I the only one who thinks it's boneheaded and frustrating to have so many different versions of the same OS? If I were shopping for a copy of XP today, I would have absolutely no idea which one to get. Maybe that's the idea. I'm not sure exactly what the scam is, but Microsoft are clearly jerking us all around. And Paul Thurrot praises them for it, because it shows all the hard work Microsoft has been doing for us! Sorry, but this kind of help I don't need.
Meanwhile, Apple have done a fine job of providing one OS that works for everybody. (Or nearly everybody, since there's also Mac OS X Server.) It doesn't cost a fortune (as full versions of XP tend to), it doesn't require "product activation", and it doesn't confuse anybody with a plethora of "editions" with different features, different prices, different hardware requirements, different license agreements, etc.
Spaces looks neat, and it may be the main feature that would push me to get Leopard. However. . . I still miss my old Amiga's custom screens and public screens. The biggest shortcoming I see with Spaces is that it still (as far as I can see) doesn't allow an application to open its very own workspace, with full control over it. If you could allow a game like World of Warcraft (or Second Life, or Civ4, etc.) to run in fullscreen mode and still be able to switch to the other workspaces at will, then it would fulfill all my wishes. But since Apple aren't really into games, I tend to doubt that they've considered such a thing.
They should put the tracks on the disc as high-bitrate MP3s. Then everybody would be able to use them easily, no matter what music player they own. Oh, wait. . . But that would mean giving buyers more value for their money, rather than trying to strangle them. What was I thinking?
Record companies -- and this applies to movie studios too -- need to think less about restraining their customers and more about competing. They need to wake up and realize they're competing against books. . . beer and pizza. . . golf and bowling. . . a trip to the art gallery. . . a trip to the beach. . . a ticket to a sporting event. . . and every other form of entertainment that people pay money for. It's a competition they are capable of losing if they try hard enough.
"...and it's important to recgonize that the electric car is no panacea for our environmental/political/economic ills. It just moves the problem elsewhere, and would continue to for the forseeable future."
It doesn't just move the problem elsewhere. It also promises to be much more efficient in net energy usage. I saw one estimate of nearly six times as many miles travelled per barrel of oil consumed, assuming an oil-fired power station. A second advantage is flexibility, since electricity can be produced from a wide range of sources: oil, gas, coal, solar, wind, nuclear. That can't be said of gasoline-powered vehicles. I agree that the electric car is no panacea, but it can be a useful part of the larger solution we're all looking for.
As for diesel power, and biodiesel in particular. . . I'm a big fan of biodiesel, but the main problem right now is that our methods of producing it aren't efficient enough. We're using too much petroleum -- in fuel, pesticides and fertilizers -- to produce the stuff, and the yields per acre are low. There are people working on that problem (algae looks promising), the same way there are people working on improved batteries for electric cars, and improved solar cells, and improved nuclear reactors, etc.
It's not going to be one magical technology that cures all our energy ills. I would like to see all these lines of research pursued vigorously.
Was it? I don't remember much about the subject from that period. . . But aside from that, the important difference is that nobody in the 1930s had any clue about the theory underlying cryo-suspension. They didn't even understand what the difficulties were (i.e. if you freeze and then thaw somebody, why don't they simply wake up?), much less have any strategy in mind for overcoming them. Space travel was different because a lot of rocketry enthusiasts had a fair grasp of the difficulties involved and a decent set of ideas for how to tackle them. (re: Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth, the British Interplanetary Society, and even Buck Rogers comic strips) No such understanding existed for human cryo-suspension.
A comparable level of understanding with regard to cryonics didn't arrive until, roughly, the early 1990s. That's when we started to get a fair idea of the kind of tissue damage freezing causes (it's bad!), and of a technology that could, in theory, someday repair such damage. And there's still no guarantee it will ever be practical. But likewise, there doesn't seem to be anything in the laws of science that prevent it from being done. That's the basis of my guarded optimism.
Long-term suspension is "science fiction" in the sense that space travel was science fiction back in the 1930s. Then in the 1960s we landed on the moon. That's how fast science fiction can become reality.
How do you really think somebody will have to be suspended before we have the technology to revive them? A hundred years? Two hundred? Those are not likely guesses, from my standpoint. If nanotechnology-based reconstruction will work for this purpose as we "transhumanist nut-jobs" hope, we'll probably have it in about 40 or 50 years, or maybe 60 or 70 at the very longest. On the other hand, if it turns out, for whatever reason, that nanomachines can't do this, then it will probably never be possible to revive them.
Anyhow. . . What they are doing with the pigs is not particularly interesting from a transhumanist cryosuspension standpoint.
With regard to hiring. . . After a company reaches a certain level of success and public recognition, large numbers of people start applying for jobs just because they want to work for a successful company -- not because they want to help make the company successful. In other words, they want to ride the gravy train. Those are the ones you have to weed out.
Start-ups and small companies rarely have this problem. It's after your company turns out to be Google, then everybody wants to climb on board.
Virtualization is better than dual-booting, but you still get all the natural disadvantages that come with WinXP. To wit: high price tag, vulnerability to malware, and bad karma from supporting the Evil Empire. There are a very small number of Windows programs that I would like to run, but this price is just too high. WINE and Crossover Office represent my real hope for the future.
RONJA & Free Space Optics
on
Own the Last Mile
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· Score: 3, Informative
Free space optics (FSO) have been used to created community networks (free and otherwise). The advantages are: high speed full-duplex connections, no need to lay cable, no need for RF spectrum or broadcasting licenses.
Cost can be a problem, because it's strictly point-to-point, and you need a transceiver at each end of each link. That can rapidly add up to a lot of transceivers. And commercial transceivers are expensive. By comparison, the RONJA device can be made very cheaply, in terms of components costs -- but they take a lot of skilled labor to assemble. Check it --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronja
The good news about FSO costs is, the network can start small and add one node at a time, and not have to pay the full up-front costs of something like laying fiber.
The other problem is that FSO has limited range and is strictly line-of-sight. Depending on terrain, trees and buildings, you may have to be pretty ingenious in placing the transceivers, and you might need towers or repeaters in some instances.
I am looking forward to Wi-Max, by the way. That's another technology with potential to change things.
Re:I like this analogy
on
Own the Last Mile
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've been observing Microsoft for many years. Their whole business was built on the idea that the platform with the most software Wins, and therefore third-party developers for the Windows platform must be supported, nurtured, coddled, wooed. . . as long as they aren't doing something that competes with Microsoft itself, of course.
Microsoft treats most of the world like dirt. End users get treated like dirt, and ripped off on a massive scale. Corporate clients get manipulated, jerked around, and treated like dirt. Competitors get buried, or bought, or bought and buried. Even national governments sometimes are lied to, jerked around, and treated like dirt. Partners (like PC makers) are strong-armed into serving Microsoft's interests. The only people in the world who Microsoft play nice with are their domesticated Windows software developers.
So, it's natural for Windows software developers to scratch their heads and wonder why everybody else talks so mean about this wonderful company.
Actually, no. . . If Microsoft feel their copyrights are being violated, they can prosecute the violators in court. I'm not aware of any law which enables them to remotely sabotage somebody's computer. In fact, I'm pretty sure we have laws against doing that. And I'm certainly not aware of Microsoft having "every right to do what they can" to anybody they think is in violation, as you suggested. Only the Mafia can do that.
The comments I read here are depressing. . . Can I possibly be this far out of touch with the world around me? Or are you all just a bunch of ignorant goofs, as I'm beginning to suspect?
By any normal logic, a high-definition videodisc format is badly needed, overdue, and should be a raging success. The transition to HDTV is well under way, it's been going for several years, and all the other pieces are in place. We have the sets, we have the OTA broadcasts, we have cable and satellite, we have HD DVRs. . . The only major element still missing is a format for pre-recorded movies. This should have been on the market two or three years ago. I see people saying it's too soon, and I just can't believe it. From where I sit, it's nearly too late. If HD is faltering, it's at least partly because we haven't had a HD disc format until now.
I see people saying HD isn't much better than DVDs. What is wrong with their eyes? They need glasses, they need laser surgery, or maybe they just need to see some actual HD video and be blown away by it. HD video is a much, much greater improvement in quality than DVD was over LaserDisc. (In fact, its arguable whether DVD video quality is better than LD at all.) In my opinion DVD was never even really needed. We could have made do with LD until a hi-def format was available -- which should have been two or three years before now.
The article lambasts the new formats for not providing "real HD" at 1080p and giving us only mere 1080i or 720p. WTF? He completely lost me on that one. 1080i and 720p are real HD, they are the broadcast standards for HD video. As far as I know, 1080p isn't even a standard, it's just a marketing gimmick that somebody dreamed up. If your life depended on it you couldn't tell the difference with your eyes between 1080p and 1080i or 720p video. It's ironic that he would try to draw a distinction between 1080p and 1080i while people on some other planet (the Mole People of Myopia Six!) are claiming they can't see any difference between SD and HD.
HD is coming. We simply can't be stuck with NTSC video standards out of the 1950s from now until doomsday, that's not acceptable to someone who believes in progress as I do.
Now the bad news. . . Things I agree with the article about: The whole format war is a huge headache. DRM is a huge headache. HDMI is a huge headache. People don't want headaches, and they sure don't want to shell out big money for headaches. The companies foisting this nonsense onto us better wake up and realize they are competing for our beer money. They're competing against books, against vacations, against pizza, against a million other things that consumers can spend their money on. And its a competition they are capable of losing if they try hard enough.
Laserdisc was a successful format for many years. It didn't take over the world, but it was viable for a long time until DVD came and replaced it. Either of these new formats would be lucky to "go the way of laserdisc" and have a long, fairly successful career before finally being replaced by something similar but better.
How in the world did Vista ever become the "largest software project in mankind's history"? I mean, this is an operating system. This is just an OS for a microcomputer, for pity's sake! It's not running the Internation Space Station. It's not running a nuclear aircraft carrier. It's just supposed to manage a personal computer.
This shouldn't be so hard. It shouldn't be so big, or so complicated. I know we expect our computers to do a lot these days, but still. . . Shouldn't application software do most of the heavy lifting anyhow? I'm just trying to figure out why it takes hundreds of megabytes of OS -- and fifty levels of dependencies, according to the article -- to manage a desktop computer and provide APIs.
I'm confident the price will come down, maybe pretty quickly. They do both offer value that a regular DVD doesn't -- assuming you value high-definition video, which I do. The DRM, though. . . That just sickens me. The whole "format war" and DRM sicken me because they're crippling a product we actually do need.
I want to see the transition to HDTV be successful. We can't be stuck with NTSC from now until doomsday, that's just too depressing to contemplate. But if now isn't the time for HD, then when will be? 2010? 2020? The technology exists right now. But I think the biggest thing holding back HDTV right now is the lack of HD videodiscs. They should have been available several years ago, really. Even if they had to use a 7-inch disc format, I would have been cool with that.
But instead we are getting HD discs *late*, and we're getting a stupid, pointless format war, and we're getting draconian DRM shoved down our throats. It's absolutely disgusting.
Sorry, no. . . I've got to question your logic there.
It's true DVDs are a relatively new format, *but* the point you're missing is that they weren't a huge improvement over what came before: namely, LaserDisc. And LaserDisc was introduced in. . . 1978? 1979? Sometime around then. The audio and video quality of DVD is practically identical to that of LD. The DVD merely puts it into a smaller and longer-playing format. Which is nice, but. . . DVDs are still displaying NTSC video, and NTSC is old and decrepit. It's way past due for replacement.
If you "love the quality" of DVD video, then you probably need some exposure to what HD can do. DVD video is muddy and blurry. HD video looks like a movie screen -- or better, possibly. (Definitely better than the crummy projector we have at my local theater.)
If you think of DVD as being merely a minor refinement of LD -- both of them are optical discs with NTSC video -- then we're talking about 25+ year old format. Yes, it's high time for high-def!
Regular DVDs look "great" only in comparison with VHS tape, and VHS is a joke. DVDs and LaserDiscs both push the limits of the NTSC standard -- a standard that is decades old and well past due for replacement. I do think the HD disc format war is depressing, and all the DRM they are piling on is depressing, and it frustrates me because they are screwing up something we really need.
Slashdot Mirror
Check this: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33 227017.pdf
The paper appears to shoot down any chance of an IEC fusion reactor producing useful energy outputs. This paper has been around for a while and is one reason why so few people are interested in IEC (or similar systems) these days. I'm not qualified to follow the scientific argument, but I'd love to know whether Dr. Bussard can answer it.
Bussard has conducted an experiment which he believes was successful. He has proposed funding a repeat of the experiment, with better instrumentation, followed by a review panel to assess its meaning and potential. That sounds like science to me. If nobody in the world is willing to put up the funding needed to verify it, that's a failure of science.
I think we're mixing up two different meanings of the word "theory". When we speak of "string theory" we aren't talking about a specific scientific theory (as in theory of gravity, etc.). . . We're talking about a field of theoretical (as opposed to experimental) study.
Put another way. . . The "Theory of Evolution" is what Charles Darwin came up with. "Evolution Theory" is the field of study that was spawned from it. In the case of strings, we have "String Theory" as a field of study, but it hasn't yet produced a worthy "Theory of Strings" to enshrine in the scientific canon, and it's now looking highly questionable that it ever will.
Over on teslamotorsclub.com we did some back-of-envelope calculations and figured two of these EEStor units should fit into the same compartment where the Li-ion pack is currently housed in the Tesla Roadster, and each of them should store slightly more energy than the whole Li-ion pack -- meaning the car's range per charge could be slightly more than 500 miles.
So. . . There's your lightweight go-kart. Except it weighs about 500 pounds more than an Elise -- but it's still a very small two-seater car. How that would translate to a larger, four-door car is open to question.
The 500 mile range is a particularly important milestone to reach, since that's the maximum distance many people (including myself) are inclined to drive during a day. If you can literally drive all day and charge at night (perhaps at a motel?), then the whole "fast charging" issue becomes a non-issue. Nobody cares how long an overnight charge takes as long as it's done overnight.
I want to point out that EEStor have not made any "outrageous claims" at all. They've filed a patent, they've inked a deal with Feel Good Cars. . . And otherwise they've kept very quiet: they don't give interviews, they don't even have a website, and they try to discourage papers from writing about them. All the breathless talk that's been flying about their product is rumor. It's all claims that people have distilled out of the patent or wheedled out of "anonymous insiders" who claim to be in the loop.
The word "nanotechnology" has truly lost all meaning.
Back in the 1980s we (and by "we" I mean people who read Engines of Creation) knew what nanotechnology meant: molecular-scale, atomically precise machines, robots, and things built by them. It meant nanomachines with gears, levers, motors, processors, power storage, etc. We dared hoped by this time (2006) the technology just might have come to fruition. So. . . What did we get instead? We got people slapping the "nanotechnology" label on any kind of material with small particles, in the hopes that investors will then shower them with money. If real nanotechnology ever appears, we'll have to figure out a new name for it.
I never knew that Dell made a MP3 player. This is the first I've heard about it.
I guess that's a pretty good summary of how it went over?
Stories like this make me want a Tesla Roadster somewhat less than I did before. It's powered by 6,800 Li-ion cells.
Naah, who am I kidding? I'd still give my left kidney for one. Flames are great, maybe we could channel them out the tail like the old Batmobile.
Yes, the IBM PC changed the world -- very much for the worse.
Before it came along there was a flourishing ecosystem of computer platforms: Tandy, Texas Instruments, Sinclair, Acorn, Commodore, Atari, Apple and several others. Then IBM came along and simply wiped them all out. Some (Atari and Commodore) straggled and survived longer than others, and Apple was never quite killed off completely, but we were nonetheless left with a tremendously impoverished environment.
And I still don't really understand how it happened.
In 1982 I got a new computer -- an Atari 800XL for $250 plus a floppy drive for $400. Just about the same time my high school bought some new IBM PCs. Both systems came with BASIC and were capable of performing many of the same kinds of tasks. My Atari had full color graphics and some decent sound effects. The IBMs had green text displays and a buzzer, and each of them cost several times as much as my Atari. (Now in retrospect, the fact that the IBMs were built like tanks and were unsuited to playing games surely must have looked like big advantages from the school's standpoint.)
It didn't make right good sense to me. After the IBM PC was introduced, the speed with which it took over the marketplace was dizzying. It seems like it was less than a year before people were talking about the IBM PC as the "de facto standard", and all the previously established platforms (Commodore, Atari, TI) and their associated software were vanishing from store shelves. Sitting here with my very nifty Atari system, I had no idea why it was happening -- certainly nobody had asked my opinion on the subject. From my viewpoint the IBM PC had nothing interesting to offer.
Later I worked my way through an Atari 520ST, Amiga 2000/2500, Amiga 3000T, Amiga 4000. . . Atari and Amiga were the hot platforms for games, while PCs were still puttering along with 8/16 bit processors, unusable GUIs (if any at all), CGI graphics, and mere buzzers for sound. And yet. . . Ease of use, excellent graphics and sound, low prices and raw speed were no avail against the flood of PClones. Once again, I didn't understand. Why did so many people seem stupid about this?
After the Amiga platform pretty much died, I put together a generic 90MHz Pentium Win95, which was a disaster. I later rebuilt it as a 233 MHz AMD Win98 system, which was slightly less a disaster, but that was really the Dark Age of my computer experiences. It was the only computer I've ever owned that I've fundamentally disliked.
After that it was iMac DV (nice hardware, too bad about Mac OS 8/9), then Mac OS X and Power Mac G4, Power Mac G5, and I was mostly happy again. But from where I sit, it still seems like everything good we have in the computer world today -- everything -- has come in spite of the IBM PC platform and Microsoft, not because of them.
Setting aside the tablet and embedded stuff. . . All this different "editions" of XP are not something I would brag about. Am I the only one who thinks it's boneheaded and frustrating to have so many different versions of the same OS? If I were shopping for a copy of XP today, I would have absolutely no idea which one to get. Maybe that's the idea. I'm not sure exactly what the scam is, but Microsoft are clearly jerking us all around. And Paul Thurrot praises them for it, because it shows all the hard work Microsoft has been doing for us! Sorry, but this kind of help I don't need.
Meanwhile, Apple have done a fine job of providing one OS that works for everybody. (Or nearly everybody, since there's also Mac OS X Server.) It doesn't cost a fortune (as full versions of XP tend to), it doesn't require "product activation", and it doesn't confuse anybody with a plethora of "editions" with different features, different prices, different hardware requirements, different license agreements, etc.
Spaces looks neat, and it may be the main feature that would push me to get Leopard. However. . . I still miss my old Amiga's custom screens and public screens. The biggest shortcoming I see with Spaces is that it still (as far as I can see) doesn't allow an application to open its very own workspace, with full control over it. If you could allow a game like World of Warcraft (or Second Life, or Civ4, etc.) to run in fullscreen mode and still be able to switch to the other workspaces at will, then it would fulfill all my wishes. But since Apple aren't really into games, I tend to doubt that they've considered such a thing.
They should put the tracks on the disc as high-bitrate MP3s. Then everybody would be able to use them easily, no matter what music player they own. Oh, wait. . . But that would mean giving buyers more value for their money, rather than trying to strangle them. What was I thinking?
Record companies -- and this applies to movie studios too -- need to think less about restraining their customers and more about competing. They need to wake up and realize they're competing against books. . . beer and pizza. . . golf and bowling. . . a trip to the art gallery. . . a trip to the beach. . . a ticket to a sporting event. . . and every other form of entertainment that people pay money for. It's a competition they are capable of losing if they try hard enough.
"...and it's important to recgonize that the electric car is no panacea for our environmental/political/economic ills. It just moves the problem elsewhere, and would continue to for the forseeable future."
It doesn't just move the problem elsewhere. It also promises to be much more efficient in net energy usage. I saw one estimate of nearly six times as many miles travelled per barrel of oil consumed, assuming an oil-fired power station. A second advantage is flexibility, since electricity can be produced from a wide range of sources: oil, gas, coal, solar, wind, nuclear. That can't be said of gasoline-powered vehicles. I agree that the electric car is no panacea, but it can be a useful part of the larger solution we're all looking for.
As for diesel power, and biodiesel in particular. . . I'm a big fan of biodiesel, but the main problem right now is that our methods of producing it aren't efficient enough. We're using too much petroleum -- in fuel, pesticides and fertilizers -- to produce the stuff, and the yields per acre are low. There are people working on that problem (algae looks promising), the same way there are people working on improved batteries for electric cars, and improved solar cells, and improved nuclear reactors, etc.
It's not going to be one magical technology that cures all our energy ills. I would like to see all these lines of research pursued vigorously.
Was it? I don't remember much about the subject from that period. . . But aside from that, the important difference is that nobody in the 1930s had any clue about the theory underlying cryo-suspension. They didn't even understand what the difficulties were (i.e. if you freeze and then thaw somebody, why don't they simply wake up?), much less have any strategy in mind for overcoming them. Space travel was different because a lot of rocketry enthusiasts had a fair grasp of the difficulties involved and a decent set of ideas for how to tackle them. (re: Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth, the British Interplanetary Society, and even Buck Rogers comic strips) No such understanding existed for human cryo-suspension.
A comparable level of understanding with regard to cryonics didn't arrive until, roughly, the early 1990s. That's when we started to get a fair idea of the kind of tissue damage freezing causes (it's bad!), and of a technology that could, in theory, someday repair such damage. And there's still no guarantee it will ever be practical. But likewise, there doesn't seem to be anything in the laws of science that prevent it from being done. That's the basis of my guarded optimism.
Long-term suspension is "science fiction" in the sense that space travel was science fiction back in the 1930s. Then in the 1960s we landed on the moon. That's how fast science fiction can become reality.
How do you really think somebody will have to be suspended before we have the technology to revive them? A hundred years? Two hundred? Those are not likely guesses, from my standpoint. If nanotechnology-based reconstruction will work for this purpose as we "transhumanist nut-jobs" hope, we'll probably have it in about 40 or 50 years, or maybe 60 or 70 at the very longest. On the other hand, if it turns out, for whatever reason, that nanomachines can't do this, then it will probably never be possible to revive them.
Anyhow. . . What they are doing with the pigs is not particularly interesting from a transhumanist cryosuspension standpoint.
With regard to hiring. . . After a company reaches a certain level of success and public recognition, large numbers of people start applying for jobs just because they want to work for a successful company -- not because they want to help make the company successful. In other words, they want to ride the gravy train. Those are the ones you have to weed out.
Start-ups and small companies rarely have this problem. It's after your company turns out to be Google, then everybody wants to climb on board.
Virtualization is better than dual-booting, but you still get all the natural disadvantages that come with WinXP. To wit: high price tag, vulnerability to malware, and bad karma from supporting the Evil Empire. There are a very small number of Windows programs that I would like to run, but this price is just too high. WINE and Crossover Office represent my real hope for the future.
Free space optics (FSO) have been used to created community networks (free and otherwise). The advantages are: high speed full-duplex connections, no need to lay cable, no need for RF spectrum or broadcasting licenses.
Cost can be a problem, because it's strictly point-to-point, and you need a transceiver at each end of each link. That can rapidly add up to a lot of transceivers. And commercial transceivers are expensive. By comparison, the RONJA device can be made very cheaply, in terms of components costs -- but they take a lot of skilled labor to assemble. Check it --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronja
The good news about FSO costs is, the network can start small and add one node at a time, and not have to pay the full up-front costs of something like laying fiber.
The other problem is that FSO has limited range and is strictly line-of-sight. Depending on terrain, trees and buildings, you may have to be pretty ingenious in placing the transceivers, and you might need towers or repeaters in some instances.
I am looking forward to Wi-Max, by the way. That's another technology with potential to change things.
I've been observing Microsoft for many years. Their whole business was built on the idea that the platform with the most software Wins, and therefore third-party developers for the Windows platform must be supported, nurtured, coddled, wooed. . . as long as they aren't doing something that competes with Microsoft itself, of course.
Microsoft treats most of the world like dirt. End users get treated like dirt, and ripped off on a massive scale. Corporate clients get manipulated, jerked around, and treated like dirt. Competitors get buried, or bought, or bought and buried. Even national governments sometimes are lied to, jerked around, and treated like dirt. Partners (like PC makers) are strong-armed into serving Microsoft's interests. The only people in the world who Microsoft play nice with are their domesticated Windows software developers.
So, it's natural for Windows software developers to scratch their heads and wonder why everybody else talks so mean about this wonderful company.
Actually, no. . . If Microsoft feel their copyrights are being violated, they can prosecute the violators in court. I'm not aware of any law which enables them to remotely sabotage somebody's computer. In fact, I'm pretty sure we have laws against doing that. And I'm certainly not aware of Microsoft having "every right to do what they can" to anybody they think is in violation, as you suggested. Only the Mafia can do that.
The comments I read here are depressing. . . Can I possibly be this far out of touch with the world around me? Or are you all just a bunch of ignorant goofs, as I'm beginning to suspect?
By any normal logic, a high-definition videodisc format is badly needed, overdue, and should be a raging success. The transition to HDTV is well under way, it's been going for several years, and all the other pieces are in place. We have the sets, we have the OTA broadcasts, we have cable and satellite, we have HD DVRs. . . The only major element still missing is a format for pre-recorded movies. This should have been on the market two or three years ago. I see people saying it's too soon, and I just can't believe it. From where I sit, it's nearly too late. If HD is faltering, it's at least partly because we haven't had a HD disc format until now.
I see people saying HD isn't much better than DVDs. What is wrong with their eyes? They need glasses, they need laser surgery, or maybe they just need to see some actual HD video and be blown away by it. HD video is a much, much greater improvement in quality than DVD was over LaserDisc. (In fact, its arguable whether DVD video quality is better than LD at all.) In my opinion DVD was never even really needed. We could have made do with LD until a hi-def format was available -- which should have been two or three years before now.
The article lambasts the new formats for not providing "real HD" at 1080p and giving us only mere 1080i or 720p. WTF? He completely lost me on that one. 1080i and 720p are real HD, they are the broadcast standards for HD video. As far as I know, 1080p isn't even a standard, it's just a marketing gimmick that somebody dreamed up. If your life depended on it you couldn't tell the difference with your eyes between 1080p and 1080i or 720p video. It's ironic that he would try to draw a distinction between 1080p and 1080i while people on some other planet (the Mole People of Myopia Six!) are claiming they can't see any difference between SD and HD.
HD is coming. We simply can't be stuck with NTSC video standards out of the 1950s from now until doomsday, that's not acceptable to someone who believes in progress as I do.
Now the bad news. . . Things I agree with the article about: The whole format war is a huge headache. DRM is a huge headache. HDMI is a huge headache. People don't want headaches, and they sure don't want to shell out big money for headaches. The companies foisting this nonsense onto us better wake up and realize they are competing for our beer money. They're competing against books, against vacations, against pizza, against a million other things that consumers can spend their money on. And its a competition they are capable of losing if they try hard enough.
Laserdisc was a successful format for many years. It didn't take over the world, but it was viable for a long time until DVD came and replaced it. Either of these new formats would be lucky to "go the way of laserdisc" and have a long, fairly successful career before finally being replaced by something similar but better.
How in the world did Vista ever become the "largest software project in mankind's history"? I mean, this is an operating system. This is just an OS for a microcomputer, for pity's sake! It's not running the Internation Space Station. It's not running a nuclear aircraft carrier. It's just supposed to manage a personal computer.
This shouldn't be so hard. It shouldn't be so big, or so complicated. I know we expect our computers to do a lot these days, but still. . . Shouldn't application software do most of the heavy lifting anyhow? I'm just trying to figure out why it takes hundreds of megabytes of OS -- and fifty levels of dependencies, according to the article -- to manage a desktop computer and provide APIs.
I'm confident the price will come down, maybe pretty quickly. They do both offer value that a regular DVD doesn't -- assuming you value high-definition video, which I do. The DRM, though. . . That just sickens me. The whole "format war" and DRM sicken me because they're crippling a product we actually do need.
I want to see the transition to HDTV be successful. We can't be stuck with NTSC from now until doomsday, that's just too depressing to contemplate. But if now isn't the time for HD, then when will be? 2010? 2020? The technology exists right now. But I think the biggest thing holding back HDTV right now is the lack of HD videodiscs. They should have been available several years ago, really. Even if they had to use a 7-inch disc format, I would have been cool with that.
But instead we are getting HD discs *late*, and we're getting a stupid, pointless format war, and we're getting draconian DRM shoved down our throats. It's absolutely disgusting.
Makes me want to go read a book.
Sorry, no. . . I've got to question your logic there.
It's true DVDs are a relatively new format, *but* the point you're missing is that they weren't a huge improvement over what came before: namely, LaserDisc. And LaserDisc was introduced in. . . 1978? 1979? Sometime around then. The audio and video quality of DVD is practically identical to that of LD. The DVD merely puts it into a smaller and longer-playing format. Which is nice, but. . . DVDs are still displaying NTSC video, and NTSC is old and decrepit. It's way past due for replacement.
If you "love the quality" of DVD video, then you probably need some exposure to what HD can do. DVD video is muddy and blurry. HD video looks like a movie screen -- or better, possibly. (Definitely better than the crummy projector we have at my local theater.)
If you think of DVD as being merely a minor refinement of LD -- both of them are optical discs with NTSC video -- then we're talking about 25+ year old format. Yes, it's high time for high-def!
Regular DVDs look "great" only in comparison with VHS tape, and VHS is a joke. DVDs and LaserDiscs both push the limits of the NTSC standard -- a standard that is decades old and well past due for replacement. I do think the HD disc format war is depressing, and all the DRM they are piling on is depressing, and it frustrates me because they are screwing up something we really need.