Well, the idea was to make it easier on new users.. and the windows interface is pretty well know. But assuming you were going to use something else.. what? For all its horrible problems, windows really isnt that bad a UI. it's what you're interfacing With that has problems. Sure, there are probably cooler-looking ways of doing it, but you can tell what a given part of a windows interface does at a glance, where a cooler one would require learning how to use it.. which isnt a bad thing, but if the whole idea is to get away from having to read a users manual just to install the program, it'd be rather counter productive.
Most books/movies with teleportation assume the actual body being moved is travelling.. in trek the person is broken down and their actual component molecules are sent along with a reconstruction pattern on a data stream.. kinda inefficient way of doing things, but hey. The current bleeding edge in that tech direction is some guys trying to recreate an electron by scanning it and sending the data over a cable to another location where... something is done to another electron to make it exactly emulate the firt. It's been a while since i read the article. The thing was that even if they ever got it to work on complex structures (they were planning to try a virus in a few years if the electron works out) the object being scanned is destroyed in the process.. so keeping around copies isnt an option Dreamweaver
Forget swords.. try this one on for size: Carefully wound 'strings' of the stuff (perhaps as many as a few hundred, considering how little space they would take up), each with a small sliver of superconductor at one end, the other end attached to an unpowered electromagnet in the base of a small tube (about the size of a can of mace for example) which was itself ringed in electromagnetic coils (powered) to keep the things centerd. Some guy comes running at you with his neato-keen sword, you hold up a hand, flip the button and his head/torso region turns into a pile of fillet on the ground as the hundreds of 'strings' are propelled out of the tube at high speed.. Dreamweaver
I heard about this stuff years ago too.. seems like a few times a year you hear about some really cool new storage device and then that's the end of it except occasional blurbs.. If i remember (and that's far from a certainty) correctly the storage space was determined by the number of facets and the clarity of the crystal medium.. making high-facet diamonds the most likely prospects. The problem here, obviously, is that flawless diamonds are in themselves expensive and having them cut in any large number of facets isnt cheap either. The other thing was data retrival. They could pump data in easy enough (dont ask me how.. it was something to do with lasers, but what these days Isnt something to do with lasers?) but retriving it was hard.. like i said i dont remember details, but the analogy i remember was trying to read from RAM without knowing the memory address, which could well be totally inaccurate.
Anyways, i'd really like to see some new storage medium, using magnetic storage in the decade of the CD just seems wrong somehow. I remember a short segment on the news a while back (like 4-6 months) about some college lab developing a new storage medium using a silicon needle a few atoms wide to read and write on these little penny-sized wafers that was supposed to hold 100 times as much as a CD and be available in wristwatch-sized readers for music in like 5 years.. but havent heard a Word since then. Perhaps somebody wants to post some URLs for the more interesting data storage projects that never made it? (or are still struggling toward making it) Dreamweaver
Dont see why they would be.. the way they're explained in star wars books is severely improbable (and only that because saying impossible is never a good thing) and even if you managed to make one using pre-created plasma held in place with a very interestingly shaped magnetic field ('cause they dont form in that shape under any conitions i can think of) it'd still be an essentially useless weapon. The balance would be hideous, you couldnt look directly at the thing, and unless you found some magic way to make temperature falloff faster than physically possible, you couldnt hold it in your hand without said hand turning into charcoal. Dreamweaver
The problem isnt that people are getting stupid, it's that the job field is getting bigger and colleges are staying the same. Let's face it, with a few exceptions most colleges have very little different from highschool except that the tests are harder, the classes are bigger, and you get to pick what you study. People used to go to college knowing little more than what they wanted to do as a career. They took that as their major and learned most of what they would need in their future job right there in college. Now that's essentially impossible. If you dont already know the subject you're going to college for you're going to have a hell of a time because the professors Expect you to already know your subject. I took an introductory class to C/C++ last semester.. every student who didnt already know the language failed. Not because the information wasnt there, we had an enormous textbook that ha pretty much everything you'd need to know for general purpose C programming. However, in trying to teach everything you'll need to know for cpt 103 next semester they have to pack it all in tight. By week 3 we were on functions and people still didnt know what exactly a variable was.
People who ask "Hey, where can i get a degree in programming X" arent idiots, they do it because they know X, they're already reasonably talented at programming X, and they can see themselves getting a job in X if they just had that piece of paper proving it all. When i started college i was dreaming of an environment where i would actually learn for once.. in highschool i didnt learn a thing. I already knew the subject material and could pass the classes in my sleep (which a good portion of the time i did). I was hoping for a challenge in college and was thinking about trying a 2 year program in psychology before i went on to my comp. sci. degree just because i dont know much of anything beyond the basics of psychology.
Then i got to college and realized, hey.. these guys want the same things my old HS teachers wanted.. memorize what they say and spit it back out. Sure, i expect that at some point down the road i'll probably learn something new in college.. but here i'm taking classes that teach me things i knew years ago and by the time i get to things like object oriented programming and whatnot i'll have learned that on my own too.
What i'm saying here is, if someone knows a bit about game programming, they like doing it, they think they could get a job doing it already or maybe with a bit more study on the more involved things (AI programming, the more complicated graphics programming etc), and would like to do it for, if not their career, at least as a job for a while-- and despite the cultural taboo around anything to do with 'games', it Is a good job. there are alot of game companies and you make a fair salary doing it-- let them go for it. It cant be worse than some of the college programs they give away a degree for, and it's certainly better than some of them.
Did i miss something somewhere? What the heck is a matter wave? (and assuming you're using the word 'holodeck' as a reference for a system that works like the ones in star trek, it wasnt a synthesized solid object. it's a magnetic field combined with a regular laser to basically make 3d pixels) Dreamweaver
Could be interesting with a couple more features
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The Factoid
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If it had a non-(or switchable)automatic receiver, a small LCD screen (like beeper size), a 'keep' button, the automatic transmission to servers, and a manual transmission over short range of specified info.. Whenever you wanted to remember something (a phone number, an advertisment, an address, etc) you'd hit the receive button, the info would pop up on the LCD, and if you got what you wanted, hit keep.. otherwise it wipes it after a few seconds. Then if you wanted to give the equivalent of a business card, just haul the thing out, hit send and it sends a little sig-type file to them.. now That would be cool.. no worries about spam either, since you could turn off the auto-receiver, or even with it on just not hit keep and let it wipe it out. Dreamweaver
It's called a 'Mine Mouse'. I forget who puts them out, but you can buy one for.. i think it was like $3000. It's non-invasive, just a headband with eeg sensors in it. You have to learn how to control it, but afterward you can move the mouse pointer around with the thing by thinking about it. I got an email ad a few months back from the company that makes 'em, but i dont have the link anymore. Dreamweaver
Re:Mind control before dictation?
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Bionic Rats
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I've tried 2 of the currently available voice input programs.. both took about an hour to train to my voice, and then the non-typing commands only worked about 1 time in 6.. the direct dication had a tendency to pic the wrong word if i didnt enunciate every letter, even if i said the word just the way i said it when training the thing.. so no, i'm going to have to go with that writing a paper just by talking isnt really an option. And if you read my post, you'd notice that i was wondering which would be possible first.. not which we can do now. As for the moving the pointer around, yes i knew that was available, but that's not what i meant. Even if you have to spend a year learning how to use it, it just seems really odd to me that the technology for input from the nervous system (from wires inserted into cockroach nervous systems to control little cars years ago to the rat thing and the mind-controlled mouse pointer without any invasive procedure) is advancing so much faster than speech input, which seems like it should be easier, considering the human voice can only deviate so far from a norm.. yet they had limited voice input back in the days of apple that wasnt much worse than what they have now.. just with less functions. I dont expect natural-language processing tomorrow, nor do i expect direct translation of internal language synaps functions tomorrow.. but the way technology seems to be headed, it looks like brainwave input may well catch up to or even surpass voice input. Yeah it's got a long way to go, but voice input seems to be really stagnating while this is moving right along.. and while voice processing may well be more complicated than field recognition, it just strikes me as really odd that it is that way. Dreamweaver
Mind control before dictation?
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Bionic Rats
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· Score: 2
I wonder, which will come first? The ability to write a paper on your computer simply by thinking at the screen, or the ability to write a paper on your computer by speaking at the screen? Maybe it's just me, but doesnt it seem odd that we now have the capability to control prosthetics by monitoring brainwave patters, yet we STILL cant come up with a natural language processor? (or even a non-natural language processor that can respond to voice input by non-trained users?)
In this case, a dozen and a couple hundred arent that far apart.. Even if it had as many as a thousand neurons, how many transistors would you say are on an average chip? Dreamweaver
Ah, the old 'lets strike out at the messenger'.. when we disagree with someone's views we obviously have to come up with a reason that they're wrong. Brin stated that all of it was his own opinions and that he did, in fact, like the movie.. but had problems with some of it. So we cant say he's just an idiot and didnt understand it. He's an accomplished writer so we cant say that he doesnt understand the creative process that goes into making an epic. His views were well thought out and explained so we cant just say he's just trying to be contrary.. so all that leaves is "Well he was just wrong" which isnt a very strong argument.. so since he is in some vauge way in the same league with lucas we can say "Well it's because he's jealous." afterall, none of US are jealous of lucas' billions are we? Nah.. couldnt happen.. Dreamweaver
I think the point brin was making isnt "why did palpatine do it all" so much as "why did palpatine do it all at naboo". I mean, if the queen of a piddling little planet like naboo could push through a vote of no confidence, why not a more important planet? And why was the trade federation willing to go along with it at naboo? Why were they so concerned about imposing more taxes on a little unimportant planet? Maybe Because it was way out there so they could get away with it? Maybe palpatine didnt think he could push over a more competent leader? But then, what if it hadnt worked? Did palpatine just not give any thought to what would happen if, say, he Didnt get elected? And if it werent for the jedi the federation would have succeeded in their efforts as well.. which means that it was an actual goal of palpatine's. Had he really just used them to further his own goals, he would have gone in there and blown the hell out of them as soon as he was elected to show that he was a concerned leader who cared about his senators' problems. Dreamweaver
The jews chose to be jews too.. you arent born jewish. As for alderaan, it was destroyed because it was leia's homeworld and she was (and i'm going off the movies here because i've never read, and dont plan to read, any of the books) apparently either the leader or one of the members of the leading council of the rebellion. The empire (as led by vader and palpatine) was very like nazi germany in that they didnt hate a race or group of people.. they hated everybody that wasnt them. But wait, you say, what about the holocaust? It's the same as palpatine and vader's quest against the jedi. They lead a military organization dedicated to ruling everything and killing anyone who says they cant.. but at the same time they use that organization to take out their personal vendetta against the jedi.. just like hitler's personal vendetta against judaism.
Yes, it's all the fault of the evil american propaganda machine. Afterall, all communists are good and all those evil westerns ever do is try to make them look bad. Good gods man, get a clue.
Sure communist countries dont 'spoon feed' their population popaganda.. they shove it down their throats at gunpoint. I mean come on, look at middle-eastern countries.. they arent communist (well, socialist.. since NO country is acctually communist and hasnt been since the beginning days of the concept of communism when it was discovered that giving the entirety of a country over to a few guys with no oversight was a bad idea) but thanks to the overwhelming power of government over the people they cant even watch un-edited TV or buy un-censored magazines because they might be tainted by those evil westerners.
As to "we" and "they" being the same thing, well.. they apparently arent to you. Your whole first paragraph was bashing 'they' [westerners] for being so horrible and biased. So we're all on a little orbiting rock on the outer arm of a typical galaxy off in a lonely corner of a big uncaring universe.. So What? Is there anything anybody can do about it? Not without some serious advances in more sciences than you can shake a stick at. So until someone drops FTL into our laps, our universe remains what's on this little rock.
US export restrictions have a great deal to do with national sercurity. Yes they're outdated, but when they were put into place computers capable of doing 2000 tops were the size of a typical office building and were pretty much cornered the market on icbm targetting calculations. Now most countries could build one just by importing smaller computers, and apparently now the playstation 2, something you could carry inside a briefcase, can do it. I agree that the US should probably give up trying to hold back the info, but not because it's pointless. Just imagine what would happen if tomorrow the US and all the european countries said to china "Hi, we want to be nice to you guys now, so you can come in and take any technology you want." At first it might sound like a great idea.. but think about it. Certain technologies would advance enormously while other ones that Seem less important flounder. Chinese car companies would spring into existence, but would chinese oil refiners, which would bring much less obvious and immediate change, spring into existence? Dont count on it. It's like putting a kid in a store and saying you can have what you want. They grab all the toys they've been drooling over but dont bother with the stuff they Need. Maybe every chinese home would have a computer, but they would still be impoverished and undernourished because you cant build a country-wide nutrition system overnight. Not to mention not having the knowledge to Maintain their new toys. Every time something breaks down china would have to call in someone from the US to fix it for decades until their educational system was up to par to teach their people how to do it themselves. That, on top of having to import the essentials needed to Run the new technology would drive china's economy even Futher into the ground. For decades technologically advanced countries have been trying to catch up the third world countries of the world so that they CAN share technologies. The US gives out enormous amounts of money to asian and african third-world countries every year to help them build things like sewer systems.
As for capitalism failing.. yes, it will eventually fail. Not because it's inheritly bad, but because of technology. Things become cheaper and cheaper to produce. A few more steps down the path of technological advancement and necessities like food and clothing will be so cheap as not to matter anymore. When THAT happens, traditional capitalism will fail. What will evolve from the situation? Not communism, that's for sure. It'll probably be a quasi-barter system based around the exchange of propriety data. But all that is in the future. Capitalism hasn't failed yet like you seem to think. Most of the world works off of capitalism, even socialist countries are, as a whole, capitalistic. How so? Simple, the Country (not the people in it, the country as a whole entity) buys and sells on capitalistic principles with other countries. Why? Because capitalism works. Why do we have things like labor protection laws if it works? Because people are greedy. If someone can save a buck at the cost of somebody else, they'll go for it. Greed is what drove communism into the ground in the first place. Labor protection serves to keep greed from going too far. As for unsafe conditions, you're telling me eastern countries are better off? Pull the other one. There's a reason why american compaines try to get away with opening overseas branches.. they can hire eastern workers at 12 cents a day and have them mold plastic in unventhilated factories 100 hours a week and the resident government thanks them for providing jobs and more income for the government.
America's not perfect. Europe's not perfect. But neither is asia.. not by a longshot. China's not a major threat now and wont be for a long time because they're too backward. Whatever the reason for it, they ARENT up to par with the rest of the world. They're the equivalent of a little kid with a gun. Dangerous to others, dangerous to themselves, but only because they have the gun. Take away china's nukes and it's back to "that place with too many people and not enough money". Dreamweaver
You seem to have misunderstood the idea of technological development. An AMD chip made in another country is Still an AMD chip. If, however, you went to china and bought from Wang's Computer Hardware Company, you wouldnt get an AMD chip, you would get a chinese developed chip with chinese developed architecture built using chinese processor production machinery. THAT chip would be 3 or 4 generations behind because it was developed entirely by a country that Doesnt have AMD or Intel or any other chip manufacturer from a technologically advanced country selling stuff for them to reverse engineer.
Saying that the statement that other countries are behind is wrong because your malasian AMD chip is fast is like saying that if a programmer from california moved to japan he'd suddenly become japanese. An american product from a foreign country is STILL an american product, it's just got someone else's flag on it.
You'd probably have to learn how to concentrate in just the right way to 'type' though.. if it was just 'you think, it types' you'd end up with stuff like:
Dear Sirs, I am wri-wow, what a cool colo-hey, that girl just walked past my des-i sure am thirsty-k, she's sure good looking-r scheme-ting to inform you...
Why would we create them with the ability to want more? You seem to assume that intelligent computers would be just like humans in that they would have all the same mental faculties. We would probably program the things from the start to be happy with what they do, assuming they even had emotions. Why we would give them emotions to begin with i've no idea.. afterall, it's supposed to be a computer, a tool. If at some point in the far distant future somone decides to build a computer with emotion and all the same faculties as a human, the creator would probably expect it to want things. Slaves are people who can have a better life but are forced not to.. if someone showed up on your door and said "Hi, my name is Bob and I was created to clean your house. Nothing in the entire world makes me happier than cleaning houses and I would like to clean yours." would you say no and make bob go off unhappy to live a better life than the one for which he was created, despite it making bob quite unhappy?
Depends on your defenition of a machine. If it's just any complex system, then everything is a machine. Humans, dogs, cats, trees, governments, solar systems.. And the thing i always found rather silly about the whole 'AI takes over the world' thing is that even if you cant just unplug the thing, there's always going to be some relatively easy way to shut it down. Even if it entails blowing up the building it's in.. Dreamweaver
There was a phone needed.. after he took the pill the entirety of the next scene was based around apoc trying to find neo in reality before the phone connection was completed and his consciousness just filtered off into nothing. Dreamweaver
Bullet casings Are gold (At least, every bullet casing i've ever seen has been gold colored). And when you're shooting a multi-barreled, belt-fed weapon, you tend to generate a great deal of casings.
I admit, they did have a hell of a lot of guns.
And as for the un-subtlety of fending off the guy one-handed.. that was the point. He wasnt distracted, he realized that no matter how fast the agents were, he could be faster.. so demonstrated in the way that you know perfectly well you would if you could move that fast.. he kicked his ass;)
It's not that i misunderstood it, it's that i Dont understand it.. i get the idea that things like velocity are determined by the observer, but why does it work that way? What if there's more than one observer who see different things? For instance, if two people are standing on misc. objects in space and are getting further away from each other, without a way to measure red/blue shift from surrounding stars, how would you know which is moving? if both are accelerating at nearly equal speeds, would either one gain mass if there were no 'landmarks' to juge by? If someone managed to stand at the center of the universe and observe everything, would any galaxies which had quietly accelerated faster than they should be able to unobserved suddenly slow down?
It all just seems very human-centric and doesnt seem to make much sense. I'm not saying it's wrong, alot of things in the world dont make sense.. but this is apparently supposed to *shrug* Dreamweaver
Okay, i'm no physics major.. but i try to keep current and have read enough to consider myself at the very least a knowledgable layman (yeah, i know the whole thing about a little knowledge being dangerous) and i cant say that i understand why exactly FTL travel is so impossible. I mean, why is 300,000km/s such a fundamental barrier? Okay, objects travelling anywhere near that velocity do behave oddly as we view them.. but who says that's so important? so the math says objects shouldnt exceed that speed without doing x y and z.. 100 years ago the math said a whole lot of things we know are patently false. *cough cough ether cough cough*
Now here's my take on it: relativity says that we cant exceed X m/s without having the rate we move through time change. So then in order to calculate exactly how fast you're moving, you have to do one of two things: calculate your base movement rate from an exact zero state an include your movement across the planetary surface, the revolutionary speed of the planet, speed of planet around the sun, speed of sun around galactic core, speed of galaxy in direction X (not to mention possible rotation of galaxy around unknown object(s) etc) or, the approach normally taken: ignore it. So far as i can tell from what i've read, relativity uses observer-based velocity. If your REAL velocity is 290,000km/s but the guy watching you sees you travel at 60 km/h.. according to relativity, you're doing 60 km/h. Now perhaps it's just me.. but this seems just a little silly. Why should who's watching alter everything? It's like the old 'if a tree falls in the woods and nobody's around, does it make a sound?' the obvious answer being 'yes'. Afterall, falling trees always make noise.. why would they stop? So then according to relativity, if a tree falls in the woods, and the only person around is falling too, it doesnt make a sound because, at the perspective of the observer, the tree never fell over. *shrug* i can understand collapsing waveforms and the uncertainty principle, but observer-based math just doesnt make any sense to me. Dreamweaver
Dont know about the vaccum energy you're talking about, but the term 'Vaccum Energy' usually refers to the fractional energy gain in.. umm.. dangit, i cant remember the correct term now. It's those experiments where they use a pair of charged metal plates which, because of energy inequalities between the inside and outside, are pulled together.. the only problem was that in order to get usable energy out of it you had to have enormous plates. On a side note, they're also the theoretical way to produce matter with a negative energy density. Though the theoretical object was a box the size of a proton. Dreamweaver
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the idea was to make it easier on new users.. and the windows interface is pretty well know.
But assuming you were going to use something else.. what? For all its horrible problems, windows really isnt that bad a UI. it's what you're interfacing With that has problems. Sure, there are probably cooler-looking ways of doing it, but you can tell what a given part of a windows interface does at a glance, where a cooler one would require learning how to use it.. which isnt a bad thing, but if the whole idea is to get away from having to read a users manual just to install the program, it'd be rather counter productive.
Dreamweaver
Most books/movies with teleportation assume the actual body being moved is travelling.. in trek the person is broken down and their actual component molecules are sent along with a reconstruction pattern on a data stream.. kinda inefficient way of doing things, but hey. The current bleeding edge in that tech direction is some guys trying to recreate an electron by scanning it and sending the data over a cable to another location where... something is done to another electron to make it exactly emulate the firt. It's been a while since i read the article. The thing was that even if they ever got it to work on complex structures (they were planning to try a virus in a few years if the electron works out) the object being scanned is destroyed in the process.. so keeping around copies isnt an option
Dreamweaver
Forget swords.. try this one on for size:
Carefully wound 'strings' of the stuff (perhaps as many as a few hundred, considering how little space they would take up), each with a small sliver of superconductor at one end, the other end attached to an unpowered electromagnet in the base of a small tube (about the size of a can of mace for example) which was itself ringed in electromagnetic coils (powered) to keep the things centerd. Some guy comes running at you with his neato-keen sword, you hold up a hand, flip the button and his head/torso region turns into a pile of fillet on the ground as the hundreds of 'strings' are propelled out of the tube at high speed..
Dreamweaver
I heard about this stuff years ago too.. seems like a few times a year you hear about some really cool new storage device and then that's the end of it except occasional blurbs.. If i remember (and that's far from a certainty) correctly the storage space was determined by the number of facets and the clarity of the crystal medium.. making high-facet diamonds the most likely prospects. The problem here, obviously, is that flawless diamonds are in themselves expensive and having them cut in any large number of facets isnt cheap either. The other thing was data retrival. They could pump data in easy enough (dont ask me how.. it was something to do with lasers, but what these days Isnt something to do with lasers?) but retriving it was hard.. like i said i dont remember details, but the analogy i remember was trying to read from RAM without knowing the memory address, which could well be totally inaccurate.
Anyways, i'd really like to see some new storage medium, using magnetic storage in the decade of the CD just seems wrong somehow. I remember a short segment on the news a while back (like 4-6 months) about some college lab developing a new storage medium using a silicon needle a few atoms wide to read and write on these little penny-sized wafers that was supposed to hold 100 times as much as a CD and be available in wristwatch-sized readers for music in like 5 years.. but havent heard a Word since then. Perhaps somebody wants to post some URLs for the more interesting data storage projects that never made it? (or are still struggling toward making it)
Dreamweaver
Dont see why they would be.. the way they're explained in star wars books is severely improbable (and only that because saying impossible is never a good thing) and even if you managed to make one using pre-created plasma held in place with a very interestingly shaped magnetic field ('cause they dont form in that shape under any conitions i can think of) it'd still be an essentially useless weapon. The balance would be hideous, you couldnt look directly at the thing, and unless you found some magic way to make temperature falloff faster than physically possible, you couldnt hold it in your hand without said hand turning into charcoal.
Dreamweaver
The problem isnt that people are getting stupid, it's that the job field is getting bigger and colleges are staying the same. Let's face it, with a few exceptions most colleges have very little different from highschool except that the tests are harder, the classes are bigger, and you get to pick what you study. People used to go to college knowing little more than what they wanted to do as a career. They took that as their major and learned most of what they would need in their future job right there in college. Now that's essentially impossible. If you dont already know the subject you're going to college for you're going to have a hell of a time because the professors Expect you to already know your subject. I took an introductory class to C/C++ last semester.. every student who didnt already know the language failed. Not because the information wasnt there, we had an enormous textbook that ha pretty much everything you'd need to know for general purpose C programming. However, in trying to teach everything you'll need to know for cpt 103 next semester they have to pack it all in tight. By week 3 we were on functions and people still didnt know what exactly a variable was.
People who ask "Hey, where can i get a degree in programming X" arent idiots, they do it because they know X, they're already reasonably talented at programming X, and they can see themselves getting a job in X if they just had that piece of paper proving it all. When i started college i was dreaming of an environment where i would actually learn for once.. in highschool i didnt learn a thing. I already knew the subject material and could pass the classes in my sleep (which a good portion of the time i did). I was hoping for a challenge in college and was thinking about trying a 2 year program in psychology before i went on to my comp. sci. degree just because i dont know much of anything beyond the basics of psychology.
Then i got to college and realized, hey.. these guys want the same things my old HS teachers wanted.. memorize what they say and spit it back out. Sure, i expect that at some point down the road i'll probably learn something new in college.. but here i'm taking classes that teach me things i knew years ago and by the time i get to things like object oriented programming and whatnot i'll have learned that on my own too.
What i'm saying here is, if someone knows a bit about game programming, they like doing it, they think they could get a job doing it already or maybe with a bit more study on the more involved things (AI programming, the more complicated graphics programming etc), and would like to do it for, if not their career, at least as a job for a while-- and despite the cultural taboo around anything to do with 'games', it Is a good job. there are alot of game companies and you make a fair salary doing it-- let them go for it. It cant be worse than some of the college programs they give away a degree for, and it's certainly better than some of them.
Dreamweaver
Did i miss something somewhere? What the heck is a matter wave? (and assuming you're using the word 'holodeck' as a reference for a system that works like the ones in star trek, it wasnt a synthesized solid object. it's a magnetic field combined with a regular laser to basically make 3d pixels)
Dreamweaver
If it had a non-(or switchable)automatic receiver, a small LCD screen (like beeper size), a 'keep' button, the automatic transmission to servers, and a manual transmission over short range of specified info.. Whenever you wanted to remember something (a phone number, an advertisment, an address, etc) you'd hit the receive button, the info would pop up on the LCD, and if you got what you wanted, hit keep.. otherwise it wipes it after a few seconds. Then if you wanted to give the equivalent of a business card, just haul the thing out, hit send and it sends a little sig-type file to them.. now That would be cool.. no worries about spam either, since you could turn off the auto-receiver, or even with it on just not hit keep and let it wipe it out.
Dreamweaver
It's called a 'Mine Mouse'. I forget who puts them out, but you can buy one for.. i think it was like $3000. It's non-invasive, just a headband with eeg sensors in it. You have to learn how to control it, but afterward you can move the mouse pointer around with the thing by thinking about it. I got an email ad a few months back from the company that makes 'em, but i dont have the link anymore.
Dreamweaver
I've tried 2 of the currently available voice input programs.. both took about an hour to train to my voice, and then the non-typing commands only worked about 1 time in 6.. the direct dication had a tendency to pic the wrong word if i didnt enunciate every letter, even if i said the word just the way i said it when training the thing.. so no, i'm going to have to go with that writing a paper just by talking isnt really an option. And if you read my post, you'd notice that i was wondering which would be possible first.. not which we can do now.
As for the moving the pointer around, yes i knew that was available, but that's not what i meant. Even if you have to spend a year learning how to use it, it just seems really odd to me that the technology for input from the nervous system (from wires inserted into cockroach nervous systems to control little cars years ago to the rat thing and the mind-controlled mouse pointer without any invasive procedure) is advancing so much faster than speech input, which seems like it should be easier, considering the human voice can only deviate so far from a norm.. yet they had limited voice input back in the days of apple that wasnt much worse than what they have now.. just with less functions.
I dont expect natural-language processing tomorrow, nor do i expect direct translation of internal language synaps functions tomorrow.. but the way technology seems to be headed, it looks like brainwave input may well catch up to or even surpass voice input. Yeah it's got a long way to go, but voice input seems to be really stagnating while this is moving right along.. and while voice processing may well be more complicated than field recognition, it just strikes me as really odd that it is that way.
Dreamweaver
I wonder, which will come first? The ability to write a paper on your computer simply by thinking at the screen, or the ability to write a paper on your computer by speaking at the screen?
Maybe it's just me, but doesnt it seem odd that we now have the capability to control prosthetics by monitoring brainwave patters, yet we STILL cant come up with a natural language processor? (or even a non-natural language processor that can respond to voice input by non-trained users?)
Dreamweaver
In this case, a dozen and a couple hundred arent that far apart.. Even if it had as many as a thousand neurons, how many transistors would you say are on an average chip?
Dreamweaver
Ah, the old 'lets strike out at the messenger'.. when we disagree with someone's views we obviously have to come up with a reason that they're wrong. Brin stated that all of it was his own opinions and that he did, in fact, like the movie.. but had problems with some of it. So we cant say he's just an idiot and didnt understand it. He's an accomplished writer so we cant say that he doesnt understand the creative process that goes into making an epic. His views were well thought out and explained so we cant just say he's just trying to be contrary.. so all that leaves is "Well he was just wrong" which isnt a very strong argument.. so since he is in some vauge way in the same league with lucas we can say "Well it's because he's jealous." afterall, none of US are jealous of lucas' billions are we? Nah.. couldnt happen..
Dreamweaver
I think the point brin was making isnt "why did palpatine do it all" so much as "why did palpatine do it all at naboo". I mean, if the queen of a piddling little planet like naboo could push through a vote of no confidence, why not a more important planet? And why was the trade federation willing to go along with it at naboo? Why were they so concerned about imposing more taxes on a little unimportant planet? Maybe Because it was way out there so they could get away with it? Maybe palpatine didnt think he could push over a more competent leader? But then, what if it hadnt worked? Did palpatine just not give any thought to what would happen if, say, he Didnt get elected? And if it werent for the jedi the federation would have succeeded in their efforts as well.. which means that it was an actual goal of palpatine's. Had he really just used them to further his own goals, he would have gone in there and blown the hell out of them as soon as he was elected to show that he was a concerned leader who cared about his senators' problems.
Dreamweaver
The jews chose to be jews too.. you arent born jewish. As for alderaan, it was destroyed because it was leia's homeworld and she was (and i'm going off the movies here because i've never read, and dont plan to read, any of the books) apparently either the leader or one of the members of the leading council of the rebellion. The empire (as led by vader and palpatine) was very like nazi germany in that they didnt hate a race or group of people.. they hated everybody that wasnt them. But wait, you say, what about the holocaust? It's the same as palpatine and vader's quest against the jedi. They lead a military organization dedicated to ruling everything and killing anyone who says they cant.. but at the same time they use that organization to take out their personal vendetta against the jedi.. just like hitler's personal vendetta against judaism.
Dreamweaver
Yes, it's all the fault of the evil american propaganda machine. Afterall, all communists are good and all those evil westerns ever do is try to make them look bad. Good gods man, get a clue.
Sure communist countries dont 'spoon feed' their population popaganda.. they shove it down their throats at gunpoint. I mean come on, look at middle-eastern countries.. they arent communist (well, socialist.. since NO country is acctually communist and hasnt been since the beginning days of the concept of communism when it was discovered that giving the entirety of a country over to a few guys with no oversight was a bad idea) but thanks to the overwhelming power of government over the people they cant even watch un-edited TV or buy un-censored magazines because they might be tainted by those evil westerners.
As to "we" and "they" being the same thing, well.. they apparently arent to you. Your whole first paragraph was bashing 'they' [westerners] for being so horrible and biased. So we're all on a little orbiting rock on the outer arm of a typical galaxy off in a lonely corner of a big uncaring universe.. So What? Is there anything anybody can do about it? Not without some serious advances in more sciences than you can shake a stick at. So until someone drops FTL into our laps, our universe remains what's on this little rock.
US export restrictions have a great deal to do with national sercurity. Yes they're outdated, but when they were put into place computers capable of doing 2000 tops were the size of a typical office building and were pretty much cornered the market on icbm targetting calculations. Now most countries could build one just by importing smaller computers, and apparently now the playstation 2, something you could carry inside a briefcase, can do it. I agree that the US should probably give up trying to hold back the info, but not because it's pointless.
Just imagine what would happen if tomorrow the US and all the european countries said to china "Hi, we want to be nice to you guys now, so you can come in and take any technology you want." At first it might sound like a great idea.. but think about it. Certain technologies would advance enormously while other ones that Seem less important flounder. Chinese car companies would spring into existence, but would chinese oil refiners, which would bring much less obvious and immediate change, spring into existence? Dont count on it. It's like putting a kid in a store and saying you can have what you want. They grab all the toys they've been drooling over but dont bother with the stuff they Need. Maybe every chinese home would have a computer, but they would still be impoverished and undernourished because you cant build a country-wide nutrition system overnight. Not to mention not having the knowledge to Maintain their new toys. Every time something breaks down china would have to call in someone from the US to fix it for decades until their educational system was up to par to teach their people how to do it themselves. That, on top of having to import the essentials needed to Run the new technology would drive china's economy even Futher into the ground. For decades technologically advanced countries have been trying to catch up the third world countries of the world so that they CAN share technologies. The US gives out enormous amounts of money to asian and african third-world countries every year to help them build things like sewer systems.
As for capitalism failing.. yes, it will eventually fail. Not because it's inheritly bad, but because of technology. Things become cheaper and cheaper to produce. A few more steps down the path of technological advancement and necessities like food and clothing will be so cheap as not to matter anymore. When THAT happens, traditional capitalism will fail. What will evolve from the situation? Not communism, that's for sure. It'll probably be a quasi-barter system based around the exchange of propriety data. But all that is in the future. Capitalism hasn't failed yet like you seem to think. Most of the world works off of capitalism, even socialist countries are, as a whole, capitalistic. How so? Simple, the Country (not the people in it, the country as a whole entity) buys and sells on capitalistic principles with other countries. Why? Because capitalism works. Why do we have things like labor protection laws if it works? Because people are greedy. If someone can save a buck at the cost of somebody else, they'll go for it. Greed is what drove communism into the ground in the first place. Labor protection serves to keep greed from going too far. As for unsafe conditions, you're telling me eastern countries are better off? Pull the other one. There's a reason why american compaines try to get away with opening overseas branches.. they can hire eastern workers at 12 cents a day and have them mold plastic in unventhilated factories 100 hours a week and the resident government thanks them for providing jobs and more income for the government.
America's not perfect. Europe's not perfect. But neither is asia.. not by a longshot. China's not a major threat now and wont be for a long time because they're too backward. Whatever the reason for it, they ARENT up to par with the rest of the world. They're the equivalent of a little kid with a gun. Dangerous to others, dangerous to themselves, but only because they have the gun. Take away china's nukes and it's back to "that place with too many people and not enough money".
Dreamweaver
You seem to have misunderstood the idea of technological development. An AMD chip made in another country is Still an AMD chip. If, however, you went to china and bought from Wang's Computer Hardware Company, you wouldnt get an AMD chip, you would get a chinese developed chip with chinese developed architecture built using chinese processor production machinery. THAT chip would be 3 or 4 generations behind because it was developed entirely by a country that Doesnt have AMD or Intel or any other chip manufacturer from a technologically advanced country selling stuff for them to reverse engineer.
Saying that the statement that other countries are behind is wrong because your malasian AMD chip is fast is like saying that if a programmer from california moved to japan he'd suddenly become japanese. An american product from a foreign country is STILL an american product, it's just got someone else's flag on it.
Dreamweaver
You'd probably have to learn how to concentrate in just the right way to 'type' though.. if it was just 'you think, it types' you'd end up with stuff like:
Dear Sirs,
I am wri-wow, what a cool colo-hey, that girl just walked past my des-i sure am thirsty-k, she's sure good looking-r scheme-ting to inform you...
Dreamweaver
Why would we create them with the ability to want more? You seem to assume that intelligent computers would be just like humans in that they would have all the same mental faculties. We would probably program the things from the start to be happy with what they do, assuming they even had emotions. Why we would give them emotions to begin with i've no idea.. afterall, it's supposed to be a computer, a tool. If at some point in the far distant future somone decides to build a computer with emotion and all the same faculties as a human, the creator would probably expect it to want things.
Slaves are people who can have a better life but are forced not to.. if someone showed up on your door and said "Hi, my name is Bob and I was created to clean your house. Nothing in the entire world makes me happier than cleaning houses and I would like to clean yours." would you say no and make bob go off unhappy to live a better life than the one for which he was created, despite it making bob quite unhappy?
Dreamweaver
Depends on your defenition of a machine. If it's just any complex system, then everything is a machine. Humans, dogs, cats, trees, governments, solar systems..
And the thing i always found rather silly about the whole 'AI takes over the world' thing is that even if you cant just unplug the thing, there's always going to be some relatively easy way to shut it down. Even if it entails blowing up the building it's in..
Dreamweaver
There was a phone needed.. after he took the pill the entirety of the next scene was based around apoc trying to find neo in reality before the phone connection was completed and his consciousness just filtered off into nothing.
Dreamweaver
Bullet casings Are gold (At least, every bullet casing i've ever seen has been gold colored). And when you're shooting a multi-barreled, belt-fed weapon, you tend to generate a great deal of casings.
;)
I admit, they did have a hell of a lot of guns.
And as for the un-subtlety of fending off the guy one-handed.. that was the point. He wasnt distracted, he realized that no matter how fast the agents were, he could be faster.. so demonstrated in the way that you know perfectly well you would if you could move that fast.. he kicked his ass
Dreamweaver
It's not that i misunderstood it, it's that i Dont understand it.. i get the idea that things like velocity are determined by the observer, but why does it work that way? What if there's more than one observer who see different things? For instance, if two people are standing on misc. objects in space and are getting further away from each other, without a way to measure red/blue shift from surrounding stars, how would you know which is moving? if both are accelerating at nearly equal speeds, would either one gain mass if there were no 'landmarks' to juge by? If someone managed to stand at the center of the universe and observe everything, would any galaxies which had quietly accelerated faster than they should be able to unobserved suddenly slow down?
It all just seems very human-centric and doesnt seem to make much sense. I'm not saying it's wrong, alot of things in the world dont make sense.. but this is apparently supposed to *shrug*
Dreamweaver
Okay, i'm no physics major.. but i try to keep current and have read enough to consider myself at the very least a knowledgable layman (yeah, i know the whole thing about a little knowledge being dangerous) and i cant say that i understand why exactly FTL travel is so impossible. I mean, why is 300,000km/s such a fundamental barrier? Okay, objects travelling anywhere near that velocity do behave oddly as we view them.. but who says that's so important? so the math says objects shouldnt exceed that speed without doing x y and z.. 100 years ago the math said a whole lot of things we know are patently false. *cough cough ether cough cough*
Now here's my take on it: relativity says that we cant exceed X m/s without having the rate we move through time change. So then in order to calculate exactly how fast you're moving, you have to do one of two things: calculate your base movement rate from an exact zero state an include your movement across the planetary surface, the revolutionary speed of the planet, speed of planet around the sun, speed of sun around galactic core, speed of galaxy in direction X (not to mention possible rotation of galaxy around unknown object(s) etc) or, the approach normally taken: ignore it. So far as i can tell from what i've read, relativity uses observer-based velocity. If your REAL velocity is 290,000km/s but the guy watching you sees you travel at 60 km/h.. according to relativity, you're doing 60 km/h. Now perhaps it's just me.. but this seems just a little silly. Why should who's watching alter everything? It's like the old 'if a tree falls in the woods and nobody's around, does it make a sound?' the obvious answer being 'yes'. Afterall, falling trees always make noise.. why would they stop? So then according to relativity, if a tree falls in the woods, and the only person around is falling too, it doesnt make a sound because, at the perspective of the observer, the tree never fell over. *shrug* i can understand collapsing waveforms and the uncertainty principle, but observer-based math just doesnt make any sense to me.
Dreamweaver
Dont know about the vaccum energy you're talking about, but the term 'Vaccum Energy' usually refers to the fractional energy gain in.. umm.. dangit, i cant remember the correct term now. It's those experiments where they use a pair of charged metal plates which, because of energy inequalities between the inside and outside, are pulled together.. the only problem was that in order to get usable energy out of it you had to have enormous plates.
On a side note, they're also the theoretical way to produce matter with a negative energy density. Though the theoretical object was a box the size of a proton.
Dreamweaver