The title should read: "Profile of a Real-Life Make-Believe Jedi Academy".
Compare this to the make-believe real-life Jedi Academy portrayed in the prequel movies. Getting the order of the adjectives right makes a big difference.
That's putting it rather nicely. He's an Egyptian bigot with an ego the size of the pyramid. His arrogance is completely unable to accept the fact that the progress of civilization is cyclic NOT linear.
In other words he's a major historical figure in Egyptology.
IOW, "What he's doing doesn't make sense to me; therefore, he must be on drugs." Clever.
Not really. What he did would be pretty consistent with angel dust. If a bunch of people were acting very silly and laughing at things that aren't really funny, I'd suspect pot. It doesn't mean that they couldn't just be silly people, but it'd be *reasonable* to suspect marijuana.
Anyhow, I didn't say he was on drugs, I said if I were in this situation I'd suspect drugs, which would be reasonable basis to detain him for long enough to determine that he was just being an eccentric PITA, which is not a crime.
I suspect you are confusing a bathy*scape* with a bathy*sphere*.
Trieste could operate submerged 24 hours and could move freely at a speed of 1 kt. It was succesfully used to search for the wreck of the USS Thresher (SSN-593), which it found at a depth of 8400 ft, so obviously Trieste was a very capable boat.
In it's famous Challenger Deep mission it spent 20 minutes on the bottom made at least one important scientific discovery: sole and flounder swimming. Before that it was believed that vertebrate life could not survive at such pressures. Not a bad scientific haul for an 8h 23m work day.
The bathy*sphere* was no scientific slouch either, making significant contributions to both marine biology and physics.
While I applaud your sentiment, I wouldn't necessarily endorse the use of all the incidents you cite to support those sentiments. For example:
Just before he was to be scanned, Tobey protested his treatment by removing his pants and shirt (thankfully, leaving his boxers on), and revealing a writing on his chest, “Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated.”
For thus displaying a sentence appearing in our country’s Constitution, Tobey was deemed to be a “security risk.
Personally I suspect it wasn't his attempt to "educate the TSA" (as the columnist put it) that branded him as a security risk. I think it more likely that his behavior was simply regarded as bizarre. Personally, I'd suspect PCP use if I saw somebody do this, although I wouldn't dispute that in light of further developments it was probably a sober, if unconventional act of political protest.
Sure but two simple tools will usually beat one complex tool. Particularly when the tools aren't self-healing and guided by a human intellect.
Well, I suppose in part it's a matter of scale, where success is found on either end of the scale: the perfect tool for a single job is good, a crummy tool that can do two jobs is bad, but maybe a crummy tool that can do *ten* jobs is good again. Call it the Swiss Army Knife Principle. The Swiss army knife is a collection of truly crappy tools that add up to something pretty handy.
A human arm and hand takes this principle further. It's amazingly versatile, but there's no one thing you can do with your bare hands that you couldn't do better with some kind of tool (try to keep your mind out of the gutter for a moment). So a robotic analog of a human arm might be quite a handy thing, but it's a tall order to make one. In the initial stages you'd be creating an overly complicated tool that does a few simple jobs a lot less well than a straightforward tool would.
If that's true, how did we ever end up with something like a Swiss army knife? I think a clue can be found an older name for pocket knives: *pen knife*. Knives tend to have pretty wide utility, but it turns out that a dinky little knife is the *perfect* thing you want if you want to trim a quill or reed pen. Add a second blade to do two different kinds operations on your pen, and the first time somebody ruins one of the knife blades by trying to use it as a screwdriver and you have the germ of an idea.
Possibly. Like I said, I didn't actually *do* the analysis, but this is something you could take into account. The rules *also* stipulate a limit total amount of liquid (all must fit in a 1 qt bag), and if you and your companions stuffed your bags full of 100 ml containers, that'd draw attention.
The specific liquid explosives they're concerned with are tricky and dangerous to handle. They've been used successfully in suicide bombings, but without the ability to carry on shrapnel you'd probably need a large volume to be a serious threat to a plane. That's probably why they've never been used successfully against aircraft. So a more fundamental question is, are they a threat worth addressing at all?
The question on how much more to invest in any security measure is usually much easier to answer in relative terms than absolute terms. Who can say how safe we have to be from liquid explosives in absolute terms? But it's clear that if we can make liquid explosives much less attractive than some other avenue of attack, it makes no sense to worry about them.
So really there's three questions you need to address, and once you get a no you need proceed no further. A "no" on any of them means the 100ml rule is a bad one.
(1) In the absence of the 100ml rule, are liquid explosives an attractive avenue attack? (2) In the presence of the 100ml, would attackers be better off choosing a different method? (3) Of the ways we could make liquid explosives unattractive, is the 100ml rule the least restrictive?
Roughly we need to ask is whether it is necessary, whether it is sufficient, and whether it is efficient.
I'm against security theater, but just because the utility of a something isn't immediately obviously to me, I don't immediately stake my flag in the position that it's just security theater.
And who benefits from the ridiculous 3-ounce liquid rules, besides the vendors inside airports??
While I generally agree with you, I can see the point of the 3 oz rule. It has to do with what in the software world we call "non-functional requirements" -- mainly cost and performance in this instance. While the *functional* requirement of preventing liquid explosives from being smuggled on a plane could be met with a much more lax rule, enforcing that rule in a way that allows many people to be processed fast enough, cheaply enough is a challenge.
So as system designers, how would we write the requirements for the fluid rule? Well, we'd start by figuring out what has to be accomplished, the *functional* requirement. Suppose the smallest container of any real concern would be 8 oz. The most accurate method for enforcing this would be to take the liquid out of the container and measure it in a graduated cylinder, but this would be too slow. We want the rule to allow a reasonably trained inspector to tell at glance whether a container passes the rule, regardless of the shape of the container. Those are the *non-functional* requirements. But it's simply not possible for an ordinary person to distinguish a 7.5 oz container from an 8 oz container at a glance.
Let's say we set the rule threshold at 7 oz, in order to preclude 8 oz. How do we know that's good enough? Well, we could set up a test where an inspector has to eyeball a hundred containers in two minutes. The containers are of various shapes, some of them containing the fatal 8 oz, others are only 7 oz. The results of interest would be the set of false positives (7 oz containers erroneously rejected) and the set of false negatives (8 oz containers erroneously passed).
This forces us to consider what we *really* need. We decide to ignore false positives and focus on false negatives. Since the practical measurement methods we have are highly imprecise, we decide that we'll try to achieve a false negative rate that is sufficiently low to deter this mode of attack. That is questionable decision, obviously, but not entirely unreasonable. We decide (probably by pulling it out of our behinds) that a 50% false negative rate would be sufficient. If the 7oz threshold produces a false negative rate just under 50%, then 7oz is a reasonable candidate for our rule.
So we have all the parameters we need to describe this problem. We have the exclusion goal 8 oz -- let's call that E. We have a maximum false positive (F) rate of 50% -- let's call that our goal G. Our task is to choose a rule threshold T E such that F G in our empirical tests.
Now I have no idea whatsoever whether 3oz is a reasonable choice for this rule according to this kind of analysis. I suspect it was chosen by an entirely different method, to wit: exclude ALL liquids, but then allow enough volume for women to bring common cosmetics like mascara onto the plane. That's probably a lot more restrictive than the rule needs to be, but it should produce a low false negative rate and it preserves the most significant utility to the passengers that would be lost by a total ban.
"Why would I make any more," Lucas stated about continuing with his popular sci-fi universe, "when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?"
Didn't we have an article here recently about the impact of innumeracy?
The problem with the Volt / Prius comparison is that it's not that simple. You've got to factor in operation costs. The Volt costs $0.90 less per mile to run on electric mode than the Prius. When the gasoline engine kicks in, the Volt costs $0.80 *more* per mile.
So the more affordable choice depends on what your transportation needs. Let's start somebody who is a ridiculously ideal Volt candidate. She uses her car to commute and run errands around town. She runs the car 30 miles / day on average and never goes over the limit. That works out to $9855 savings annually. She's well into the money within two years, not even counting any tax rebates.
Now let's suppose every weekend our Volt owner drives to grandma's house to deliver a basket of goodies. Grandma lives 153.5 miles away, so our Volt owner drives 35 miles on electric, 118.5 on gas. She stays over night and does an identical return trip, so she's drive a total of 237 miles on gas, at a marginal cost of and additional 189.5 for the entire weekend round trip relative to the Prius. Over the course of 52 weeks, that adds up $9859 in additional operating costs, almost exactly canceling out her electric savings, so the Volt represents $10K-$16K out of her pocket she'll never see again.
And how about Grandma? Well she only uses her car to drive to church on Sunday, and it's a mile each way, so it really doesn't matter *what* she drives. She's better off sticking with her 1980 Plymouth Volare sedan that the nice man downtown keeps running, even though the beast only gets 18 mpg.
Well, while I wouldn't want to adopt the Japanese philosophy of education wholesale, one of things I think that's worth copying from their culture is the way people don't automatically make this kind of inference: "I'm not good at X THEREFORE I shouldn't have to do X."
If you can put that behind you, then you can think this way: "I may not be naturally talented at X, but if I work hard enough I can learn to do it well enough."
Not to minimize the difficulties you're experiencing with your adopted children. I think you're taking the right approach; rather than saying "you can't do this", you're saying, "we don't know how to help you do this -- yet." It's worth remembering that ability gained through effort is *more* worthy of pride of than ability that comes from natural aptitude. I've known lots of people with remarkable talent who've never accomplished anything, but *nobody* with remarkable self-discipline who hasn't made something of their lives.
I started in this field in 1983, so I've watched -- *participated in* -- the rise of the Internet to what it is today. This thing isn't remotely like the Internet. It's more like a very successful category of products that the Internet swept away a decade or so later: on-line services like Delphi (founded 1983), CompuServe (founded 1969, consumer services launched in 1978), and AOL (founded 1983, consumer services launched 1985). These companies offered what amounted to a digital shopping mall, building private, closed infrastructure in which business partners could sell services and products to subscribers.
Al Gore introduced the term "Information Superhighway" in 1978, and in the early years of the Internet we geeks often scoffed at the simplistic metaphor; but it turns out he was describing an important property of the Internet that Delphi, CompuServe and AOL didn't have. The Internet is not an information *service*; it's infrastructure. Like a superhighway, *anyone* can get on it and go anywhere they like. That was the point of the metaphor: it's about how consumers and companies used the Internet to connect with each other without a gatekeeper, not the technicalities of how internetworking is implemented. Today we'd call this property "network neutrality".
Now the fact that access speeds have increased from 300 baud, and that people have decent video instead of some kind of RF to NSTC TV box, and that they have highly capable web browsers... all this *contributes* to the success of the Internet. But it's not the essential thing. 1983 was pre-Google; a time when libraries still had card catalogs. Getting information was a laborious process. The success of on-line dial-up services like AOL in the late 80s and early 90s shows there was plenty of demand for addressing this problem, even if it were crude by today's standards. But as soon as the value of information accessible by the Internet exceeded what any one company could cobble together, all those dial-up services were doomed.
It's worth considering that there's nothing to prevent someone from resurrecting the information shopping mall business model, using the computers and broadband access most people enjoy in their homes today. You could make a site the customer would log into with his browser, and which becomes the focus of all his Internet use. The reason nobody has done this is that consumers vastly prefer the network neutrality model to the shopping mall model.
The only way to resurrect the shopping mall model is to have a captive set of users you can *force* into using the mall. That means being a regional monopoly in broadband services, or being a mobile carrier with user locked into contracts. The dream of locking subscribers into network providers' services is still alive as a dream, if not as competitive business model. If you want to see the closest modern analog to the service depicted in TFA, look at the lame information services provided by mobile carriers such as Verizon or Sprint. Anyone seriously interested in doing the kinds of things provided by those services would much prefer to use his *choice* of services (e.g., Pandora, Gmail) over a smart phone than to take whatever the mobile carrier offers.
So to recap, the services depicted in the videos were commonplace shortly after its airing (although not with a crappy set-top box), but as soon as network-neutral technology (TCP/IP, HTTP) people abandoned them for the greater freedom of the web.
Actually, it's been proposed, and it's not as silly as it sounds. The idea is to get high enough with a balloon that an ion engine could operate. Then you'd slowly gain speed and altitude over a course of weeks transitioning from buoyancy to momentum as the atmosphere further thinned. Obviously you couldn't lift much mass this way, so some have suggested powering the balloon with microwave transmissions, reducing the need to carry fuel.
Personally, I have doubts a system like this would ever be practical. Unless the thrusters work at a fairly low altitude you'd need an enormous balloon for a tiny payload. Cutting the bureaucracy and politics out of chemical rocket design might well yield lower prices per unit mass to orbit more. But it's a neat idea because it's at least physically plausible.
Except that *books* labeled as erotica are usually written by women and targeted at a female audience. This is just the explicit end of the romance market. I have a friend who's a published author of urban fantasies whose editors keep pushing her to be more explicit.
I have another friend who writes squarely in the insert-tab-a-into-slot-b world of erotica. She *loathes* pornography, which she regards as demeaning to women, but I am at a loss to say how what she writes is not pornography. It describes a wide variety of sex acts employing various orifices, limbs, and items, in minute detail -- far more detail than is needed to carry the plot forward -- purely for the excitement and pleasure of the reader. And this author's fans discuss her work quite openly on blogs and on Amazon, even showing up at book signing events to have their pictures taken with her.
If I had to venture an anonymous guess, "erotica" is simply pornography written by respectable, middle-class women for an audience of respectable, middle-class women.
Six months to anywhere is too far. Practical colonisation of space requires that the round trip journey take no more than a day.
The *Mayflower* left England on September 6, 1620 and reached Massachusetts Bay on November 11, 1620. Rounding to the nearest day, the journey took 66 days. Actually, *two* ships started this voyage on August 5, but were forced to turn back. A second aborted attempt was made later that month. Only the third trip was "successful", with the colonists packed onto a single, tiny cargo ship.
It was another 130 days before the colonists were able to live on land, which if added to the 66 day voyage coincidentally works out to be about six months aboard the ship. During that time 49 of the 102 colonists died -- a 48% death rate which by modern standards would be an inconceivable disaster, but which by 17th C standards was a test of will.
The willingness to suffer so much and face such hardships was a great asset in the colonization of the New World. If we valued life and comfort so little, no doubt Mars colonization would be a much cheaper, more practical thing. Of course there won't be natives there to teach us how to survive or perhaps more importantly, trade valuable commodities with us. Even if there were, then mass-limited economics of space travel are such that the only thing worth trading across interplanetary distances is information.
Slashdot Mirror
8. Teach border collies instead of children.
"These are not the prequel movies you are looking for."
And for that you need the Jedi Mind Trick?
Yeah, but is that her boyfriend? He could beat me up with one hand.
He's wearing a Bob Marley Festival tee-shirt. Obviously a non-violent drug offender busted for lighting up to get closer to God.
The title should read: "Profile of a Real-Life Make-Believe Jedi Academy".
Compare this to the make-believe real-life Jedi Academy portrayed in the prequel movies. Getting the order of the adjectives right makes a big difference.
Call me when they decide where to put the Reggae telescope.
That's putting it rather nicely. He's an Egyptian bigot with an ego the size of the pyramid. His arrogance is completely unable to accept the fact that the progress of civilization is cyclic NOT linear.
In other words he's a major historical figure in Egyptology.
It's a reasonable basis when he's in a place where he poses a nuisance or dangers to others. What he does in his home is his own business.
IOW, "What he's doing doesn't make sense to me; therefore, he must be on drugs." Clever.
Not really. What he did would be pretty consistent with angel dust. If a bunch of people were acting very silly and laughing at things that aren't really funny, I'd suspect pot. It doesn't mean that they couldn't just be silly people, but it'd be *reasonable* to suspect marijuana.
Anyhow, I didn't say he was on drugs, I said if I were in this situation I'd suspect drugs, which would be reasonable basis to detain him for long enough to determine that he was just being an eccentric PITA, which is not a crime.
I suspect you are confusing a bathy*scape* with a bathy*sphere*.
Trieste could operate submerged 24 hours and could move freely at a speed of 1 kt. It was succesfully used to search for the wreck of the USS Thresher (SSN-593), which it found at a depth of 8400 ft, so obviously Trieste was a very capable boat.
In it's famous Challenger Deep mission it spent 20 minutes on the bottom made at least one important scientific discovery: sole and flounder swimming. Before that it was believed that vertebrate life could not survive at such pressures. Not a bad scientific haul for an 8h 23m work day.
The bathy*sphere* was no scientific slouch either, making significant contributions to both marine biology and physics.
While I applaud your sentiment, I wouldn't necessarily endorse the use of all the incidents you cite to support those sentiments. For example:
Just before he was to be scanned, Tobey protested his treatment by removing his pants and shirt (thankfully, leaving his boxers on), and revealing a writing on his chest, “Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated.”
For thus displaying a sentence appearing in our country’s Constitution, Tobey was deemed to be a “security risk.
Personally I suspect it wasn't his attempt to "educate the TSA" (as the columnist put it) that branded him as a security risk. I think it more likely that his behavior was simply regarded as bizarre. Personally, I'd suspect PCP use if I saw somebody do this, although I wouldn't dispute that in light of further developments it was probably a sober, if unconventional act of political protest.
Sure but two simple tools will usually beat one complex tool. Particularly when the tools aren't self-healing and guided by a human intellect.
Well, I suppose in part it's a matter of scale, where success is found on either end of the scale: the perfect tool for a single job is good, a crummy tool that can do two jobs is bad, but maybe a crummy tool that can do *ten* jobs is good again. Call it the Swiss Army Knife Principle. The Swiss army knife is a collection of truly crappy tools that add up to something pretty handy.
A human arm and hand takes this principle further. It's amazingly versatile, but there's no one thing you can do with your bare hands that you couldn't do better with some kind of tool (try to keep your mind out of the gutter for a moment). So a robotic analog of a human arm might be quite a handy thing, but it's a tall order to make one. In the initial stages you'd be creating an overly complicated tool that does a few simple jobs a lot less well than a straightforward tool would.
If that's true, how did we ever end up with something like a Swiss army knife? I think a clue can be found an older name for pocket knives: *pen knife*. Knives tend to have pretty wide utility, but it turns out that a dinky little knife is the *perfect* thing you want if you want to trim a quill or reed pen. Add a second blade to do two different kinds operations on your pen, and the first time somebody ruins one of the knife blades by trying to use it as a screwdriver and you have the germ of an idea.
Possibly. Like I said, I didn't actually *do* the analysis, but this is something you could take into account. The rules *also* stipulate a limit total amount of liquid (all must fit in a 1 qt bag), and if you and your companions stuffed your bags full of 100 ml containers, that'd draw attention.
The specific liquid explosives they're concerned with are tricky and dangerous to handle. They've been used successfully in suicide bombings, but without the ability to carry on shrapnel you'd probably need a large volume to be a serious threat to a plane. That's probably why they've never been used successfully against aircraft. So a more fundamental question is, are they a threat worth addressing at all?
The question on how much more to invest in any security measure is usually much easier to answer in relative terms than absolute terms. Who can say how safe we have to be from liquid explosives in absolute terms? But it's clear that if we can make liquid explosives much less attractive than some other avenue of attack, it makes no sense to worry about them.
So really there's three questions you need to address, and once you get a no you need proceed no further. A "no" on any of them means the 100ml rule is a bad one.
(1) In the absence of the 100ml rule, are liquid explosives an attractive avenue attack?
(2) In the presence of the 100ml, would attackers be better off choosing a different method?
(3) Of the ways we could make liquid explosives unattractive, is the 100ml rule the least restrictive?
Roughly we need to ask is whether it is necessary, whether it is sufficient, and whether it is efficient.
I'm against security theater, but just because the utility of a something isn't immediately obviously to me, I don't immediately stake my flag in the position that it's just security theater.
And who benefits from the ridiculous 3-ounce liquid rules, besides the vendors inside airports??
While I generally agree with you, I can see the point of the 3 oz rule. It has to do with what in the software world we call "non-functional requirements" -- mainly cost and performance in this instance. While the *functional* requirement of preventing liquid explosives from being smuggled on a plane could be met with a much more lax rule, enforcing that rule in a way that allows many people to be processed fast enough, cheaply enough is a challenge.
So as system designers, how would we write the requirements for the fluid rule? Well, we'd start by figuring out what has to be accomplished, the *functional* requirement. Suppose the smallest container of any real concern would be 8 oz. The most accurate method for enforcing this would be to take the liquid out of the container and measure it in a graduated cylinder, but this would be too slow. We want the rule to allow a reasonably trained inspector to tell at glance whether a container passes the rule, regardless of the shape of the container. Those are the *non-functional* requirements. But it's simply not possible for an ordinary person to distinguish a 7.5 oz container from an 8 oz container at a glance.
Let's say we set the rule threshold at 7 oz, in order to preclude 8 oz. How do we know that's good enough? Well, we could set up a test where an inspector has to eyeball a hundred containers in two minutes. The containers are of various shapes, some of them containing the fatal 8 oz, others are only 7 oz. The results of interest would be the set of false positives (7 oz containers erroneously rejected) and the set of false negatives (8 oz containers erroneously passed).
This forces us to consider what we *really* need. We decide to ignore false positives and focus on false negatives. Since the practical measurement methods we have are highly imprecise, we decide that we'll try to achieve a false negative rate that is sufficiently low to deter this mode of attack. That is questionable decision, obviously, but not entirely unreasonable. We decide (probably by pulling it out of our behinds) that a 50% false negative rate would be sufficient. If the 7oz threshold produces a false negative rate just under 50%, then 7oz is a reasonable candidate for our rule.
So we have all the parameters we need to describe this problem. We have the exclusion goal 8 oz -- let's call that E. We have a maximum false positive (F) rate of 50% -- let's call that our goal G. Our task is to choose a rule threshold T E such that F G in our empirical tests.
Now I have no idea whatsoever whether 3oz is a reasonable choice for this rule according to this kind of analysis. I suspect it was chosen by an entirely different method, to wit: exclude ALL liquids, but then allow enough volume for women to bring common cosmetics like mascara onto the plane. That's probably a lot more restrictive than the rule needs to be, but it should produce a low false negative rate and it preserves the most significant utility to the passengers that would be lost by a total ban.
From the article linked to above:
"Why would I make any more," Lucas stated about continuing with his popular sci-fi universe, "when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?"
... Into the Future.
There. Fixed that for you.
So... people buy garden wheelbarrows to cart their plants over great distances?
Didn't we have an article here recently about the impact of innumeracy?
The problem with the Volt / Prius comparison is that it's not that simple. You've got to factor in operation costs. The Volt costs $0.90 less per mile to run on electric mode than the Prius. When the gasoline engine kicks in, the Volt costs $0.80 *more* per mile.
So the more affordable choice depends on what your transportation needs. Let's start somebody who is a ridiculously ideal Volt candidate. She uses her car to commute and run errands around town. She runs the car 30 miles / day on average and never goes over the limit. That works out to $9855 savings annually. She's well into the money within two years, not even counting any tax rebates.
Now let's suppose every weekend our Volt owner drives to grandma's house to deliver a basket of goodies. Grandma lives 153.5 miles away, so our Volt owner drives 35 miles on electric, 118.5 on gas. She stays over night and does an identical return trip, so she's drive a total of 237 miles on gas, at a marginal cost of and additional 189.5 for the entire weekend round trip relative to the Prius. Over the course of 52 weeks, that adds up $9859 in additional operating costs, almost exactly canceling out her electric savings, so the Volt represents $10K-$16K out of her pocket she'll never see again.
And how about Grandma? Well she only uses her car to drive to church on Sunday, and it's a mile each way, so it really doesn't matter *what* she drives. She's better off sticking with her 1980 Plymouth Volare sedan that the nice man downtown keeps running, even though the beast only gets 18 mpg.
Seconded.
Not to say we are in any manner giving up.
Well, while I wouldn't want to adopt the Japanese philosophy of education wholesale, one of things I think that's worth copying from their culture is the way people don't automatically make this kind of inference: "I'm not good at X THEREFORE I shouldn't have to do X."
If you can put that behind you, then you can think this way: "I may not be naturally talented at X, but if I work hard enough I can learn to do it well enough."
Not to minimize the difficulties you're experiencing with your adopted children. I think you're taking the right approach; rather than saying "you can't do this", you're saying, "we don't know how to help you do this -- yet." It's worth remembering that ability gained through effort is *more* worthy of pride of than ability that comes from natural aptitude. I've known lots of people with remarkable talent who've never accomplished anything, but *nobody* with remarkable self-discipline who hasn't made something of their lives.
I started in this field in 1983, so I've watched -- *participated in* -- the rise of the Internet to what it is today. This thing isn't remotely like the Internet. It's more like a very successful category of products that the Internet swept away a decade or so later: on-line services like Delphi (founded 1983), CompuServe (founded 1969, consumer services launched in 1978), and AOL (founded 1983, consumer services launched 1985). These companies offered what amounted to a digital shopping mall, building private, closed infrastructure in which business partners could sell services and products to subscribers.
Al Gore introduced the term "Information Superhighway" in 1978, and in the early years of the Internet we geeks often scoffed at the simplistic metaphor; but it turns out he was describing an important property of the Internet that Delphi, CompuServe and AOL didn't have. The Internet is not an information *service*; it's infrastructure. Like a superhighway, *anyone* can get on it and go anywhere they like. That was the point of the metaphor: it's about how consumers and companies used the Internet to connect with each other without a gatekeeper, not the technicalities of how internetworking is implemented. Today we'd call this property "network neutrality".
Now the fact that access speeds have increased from 300 baud, and that people have decent video instead of some kind of RF to NSTC TV box, and that they have highly capable web browsers ... all this *contributes* to the success of the Internet. But it's not the essential thing. 1983 was pre-Google; a time when libraries still had card catalogs. Getting information was a laborious process. The success of on-line dial-up services like AOL in the late 80s and early 90s shows there was plenty of demand for addressing this problem, even if it were crude by today's standards. But as soon as the value of information accessible by the Internet exceeded what any one company could cobble together, all those dial-up services were doomed.
It's worth considering that there's nothing to prevent someone from resurrecting the information shopping mall business model, using the computers and broadband access most people enjoy in their homes today. You could make a site the customer would log into with his browser, and which becomes the focus of all his Internet use. The reason nobody has done this is that consumers vastly prefer the network neutrality model to the shopping mall model.
The only way to resurrect the shopping mall model is to have a captive set of users you can *force* into using the mall. That means being a regional monopoly in broadband services, or being a mobile carrier with user locked into contracts. The dream of locking subscribers into network providers' services is still alive as a dream, if not as competitive business model. If you want to see the closest modern analog to the service depicted in TFA, look at the lame information services provided by mobile carriers such as Verizon or Sprint. Anyone seriously interested in doing the kinds of things provided by those services would much prefer to use his *choice* of services (e.g., Pandora, Gmail) over a smart phone than to take whatever the mobile carrier offers.
So to recap, the services depicted in the videos were commonplace shortly after its airing (although not with a crappy set-top box), but as soon as network-neutral technology (TCP/IP, HTTP) people abandoned them for the greater freedom of the web.
Call me when you've got orbitial balloon flights.
Actually, it's been proposed, and it's not as silly as it sounds. The idea is to get high enough with a balloon that an ion engine could operate. Then you'd slowly gain speed and altitude over a course of weeks transitioning from buoyancy to momentum as the atmosphere further thinned. Obviously you couldn't lift much mass this way, so some have suggested powering the balloon with microwave transmissions, reducing the need to carry fuel.
Personally, I have doubts a system like this would ever be practical. Unless the thrusters work at a fairly low altitude you'd need an enormous balloon for a tiny payload. Cutting the bureaucracy and politics out of chemical rocket design might well yield lower prices per unit mass to orbit more. But it's a neat idea because it's at least physically plausible.
It is a bunch of funny dressed people in a room talking stupid shit, and they sound like the characters from Ivan Yefremov's Communist future sci-fi.
In other words, what is there *not* to love?
Actually, deaths are cheap in comparison to many injuries.
Oh Shit, My Wife Found Out
You see the same thing is hotels.
Except that *books* labeled as erotica are usually written by women and targeted at a female audience. This is just the explicit end of the romance market. I have a friend who's a published author of urban fantasies whose editors keep pushing her to be more explicit.
I have another friend who writes squarely in the insert-tab-a-into-slot-b world of erotica. She *loathes* pornography, which she regards as demeaning to women, but I am at a loss to say how what she writes is not pornography. It describes a wide variety of sex acts employing various orifices, limbs, and items, in minute detail -- far more detail than is needed to carry the plot forward -- purely for the excitement and pleasure of the reader. And this author's fans discuss her work quite openly on blogs and on Amazon, even showing up at book signing events to have their pictures taken with her.
If I had to venture an anonymous guess, "erotica" is simply pornography written by respectable, middle-class women for an audience of respectable, middle-class women.
Six months to anywhere is too far. Practical colonisation of space requires that the round trip journey take no more than a day.
The *Mayflower* left England on September 6, 1620 and reached Massachusetts Bay on November 11, 1620. Rounding to the nearest day, the journey took 66 days. Actually, *two* ships started this voyage on August 5, but were forced to turn back. A second aborted attempt was made later that month. Only the third trip was "successful", with the colonists packed onto a single, tiny cargo ship.
It was another 130 days before the colonists were able to live on land, which if added to the 66 day voyage coincidentally works out to be about six months aboard the ship. During that time 49 of the 102 colonists died -- a 48% death rate which by modern standards would be an inconceivable disaster, but which by 17th C standards was a test of will.
The willingness to suffer so much and face such hardships was a great asset in the colonization of the New World. If we valued life and comfort so little, no doubt Mars colonization would be a much cheaper, more practical thing. Of course there won't be natives there to teach us how to survive or perhaps more importantly, trade valuable commodities with us. Even if there were, then mass-limited economics of space travel are such that the only thing worth trading across interplanetary distances is information.