From TFA: "Closer to the hardware side of things, Heyland misses the Commodore 64's memory model. "It could overlay hardware, firmware and regular memory as needed, and had no reserved memory sections. This let me write macros that were globally available.""
Losing this is a *bad* thing? It might make sense on a single purpose device where you know what all the code running is doing, but on a modern computer running hundreds of tasks concurrently? Seems to me it would let you write lots of other globally available stuff too. I doubt you'd want most of it.
Not even close. Perhaps that generation was, but check out the pens from Livescribe. Not only do they digitize everything you write, they also record the audio going on at the same time and sync it to the handwriting. Touch a spot in your notes to hear what was being said at that time. You can even upload the animated file of your writing with synced audio.
There are a couple of really nice uses for one of these,
Taking notes in class. For anything that isn't straight text (math, chemistry, graphics, etc) pens still win hugely in speed over any computer input device. Trying to do any sort of detailed sketch on an iPad is a joke.
Walking students through a problem- write out the problem and my thoughts in real time, then save and upload. Instant tutorial
Tense department meetings/vendor discussions. We're having issues with one vendor right now, and I record every freaking thing they say on the phone. I've resisted the temptation so far to go back and play back the audio of some of the discussion, but it's the ultimate trump card. I can find any chunk of audio in seconds since my text notes are synced- no more scrubbing through mp3s trying to find it.
As a bonus, they don't rape you on the paper- you can buy nice notebooks for a few bucks more than standard, or just print the PDF files they give you. The development kit for custom apps is free as well.
The difference is that McCain's birth was questioned, the question was resolved, and people moved on. Since then the only questioning of McCain's birth has been as a counter-example to the questioning of Obama's birth. On the other hand, Obama's birth was questioned, the question was resolved, and people continued to question anyway.
The real difference is that McCain's birth was questioned, IMMEDIATELY answered, and we moved on.
Obama's birth was questioned, the question was ignored for three years, then suddenly he decides to answer it. People wonder why he didn't answer as soon as it was questioned, and assume that he couldn't answer it then, hence the delay.
Let me fix that for you: Obama's birth was questioned, IMMEDIATELY answered to the satisfaction of his Democratic primary opponents, his Republican opponents in the general election, and the Supreme Court justice who swore him in when he presented the fully legal certificate from Hawaii. All sane people moved on. It was only not "settled" in the minds of a few pathetic trolls who can't accept the fact that a black man with a funny name might actually be allowed to sit in the Oval Office.
I honestly don't understand the attraction for totally closed book exams.
Back when I was teaching Chem101, I let my students bring in a 3x5 card with any formulas or notes they wanted. The final got an 8x11 sheet of paper. This solves a couple of issues- it massively reduces cheating since you're allowed (some) notes, and it forces the student to figure out what's on the card, since space is limited. Anyone who spends the time figuring that out has just done a whole pile of studying without realizing it.
And I banned calculators on PChem tests. Just write out your work, with units- I don't give a damn about the final numerical answer. (I did offer extra credit for anyone willing to use a slide rule, but could never get a taker. I even offered to provide the slide rule...)
You're making the mistake of assuming that all high tech equipment improves at the same rate as microprocessors.
The basic physics of rocket engines hasn't changed much at all, and can't given the limitations of the chemical fuels they use.
The F-1 engine on the first stage of the Saturn 5 had a specific impulse of 263 seconds, burning kerosene and LOX
The Merlin 1C engine on the first stage of the Falcon 9 has a specific impulse of 304 seconds, burning kerosene and LOX
The Space Shuttle main engine? 363 seconds, but it uses hydrogen and LOX
That's not a lot of improvement in 40 years. Sure, there are some materials improvements and better, lighter avionics, but that doesn't buy you the massive improvement you see in other high tech areas
This is not the first game to attempt this: see the (still) unreleased Guitar Rising or the open source Little Big Star, now abandoned. I saw a guitar tutor program at CES this year that also attempts it.
None work very well. I played with Little Big Star for a while with my guitar through a POD, and while it could recognize individual notes, chords were missed a lot. The CES guitar tutorial program actually sucked- I was amazed at how bad it was. They attempted to hide it by only giving you an aggregate score at the end without ever telling you *where* you made the errors, but even the salesdroids admitted that playing perfectly wouldn't get you a 100% since it couldn't recognize correct playing all the time
A) There are lots of climate change deniers out there
B) Postmodernism has caused lots of people to think that science is all relative, and the folks in A) have adopted that banner.
I'll really argue the link here- I doubt that *anyone* in A has really, seriously read the literature from B. A is comprised primarily of folks who are either highly religious and refuse to adopt a scientific worldview at all (and would be totally horrified by the philosophy of B if they actually read it) or people who have massive financial incentives to believe that climate change isn't true. The fact that A people argue against science has far more to do with those two factors than anything a bunch of academic nutcases wrote about.
But access to PLoS Biology is free. Personally, I like that model a lot more than other journals that may have low-to-zero publication fees and tens of thousands per year for a subscription to look at the content.
Let's see. When I have a security or performance issue I can
A: Pay a bearded guy in suspenders for hours while he incants various arcane phrases like "sudo" and "grep" and hope that he actually manages to clean up the problem at the end, or
B: Press a button and have a factory fresh install in seconds.
Assuming that you have a decent build done first (Pay the bearded guy big for that) why on earth would *anyone* pick A? It's hardly just Unix- we're a Windows shop and we're heavily virtualized because it makes sense from so many different angles- security, load balance/failover, ease of setup, etc.
Radio doesn't play the music you want to hear when you want, there's no way to skip songs you're tired of and so on.
This always cracks me up with my young kids. If I'm listening to the radio in the car, either music or NPR I often hear them pipe up from the backseat "I don't like this- skip it!" Cue the discussion about how radio works for the nth time....
One thing that might be workable to some extent would be a multi-user patronage system. Rather than relying on one wealthy person, get a few thousand regular joes.
For example, I really like Iain Bank's work, especially his Culture stuff. Let him set up an account- I'll pay $20 for the next book and when the account gets fat enough he releases it. If you use either electronic distribution, virtually all of this goes directly to him (and his editor) so you don't need to sell all that many copies- with on-demand printers you can do limited print runs for those of us who actually like paper.
This could also work via serialization, similar to Dickens- I'll give you the first 3 chapters free, after that it gets serialized in a magazine that you have to pay for. This would be a lot better for unknown authors, since I probably won't pay $20 for someone I don't know I'll like.
I mean, I don't mind the odd sex scene but I really don't need a cheesy porno flick in the middle of the film that really has nothing to do with the plot.
Actually, while it wasn't important to the plot it was to the character development. The whole point is that Dreiberg is so messed up as a person that he's totally impotent even with his dream girl until he puts on the Night Owl suit. A big part of the entire comic series is just how badly being a "superhero" will mess with your personality- virtually none of them are fully functional human beings anymore. This too is why we needed to have the blue dong- Manhattan's increasing nudity is a sign of just how detached from humanity he's become.
Now, was it a *good* sex scene? I'm not so sure they did a great job on that one- when I rewatched the movie I fast forwarded past it since I understand the point they were trying to make, it wasn't all that interesting and there are plenty of other places to see boobs.
Alternates fail simply due to the lack of materials.
Spaceplane? The Lockheed VentureStar fits all the bills- except that there's no tank material that can hold LH2 at the needed temperatures and still be light enough to get to orbit on a single stage.
Elevator? Unobtanium all the way. Some theoretical studies show that carbon nanotubes *might* have the needed tensile strength, but given that we can't reliably grow flawless ones a millimeter long the 22,000 mile thing is a bit of a tough problem.
Big gun? Workable, but you can't send anything fragile, including people
I think if he looks a bit more deeply it has very little to do with lock in and everything to do with the fact all the wonderful SF ideas out there simply can't be built with our current level of technology.
Why shouldn't you have expected it? Brown did exactly the same sorts of things last time he was in office- he's the guy who gave up the governor's limo and refused to live in the governor's mansion, for example. He's an actual fiscal conservative: the American Conservative has even commented that he was far more fiscally conservative than Reagan back in his first stint as governor.
Brown was the real conservative in the race last year.
I can be a wizard in a fantasy game and shoot fireballs from my hands. I can't do that in real life
I can be a badass merc in a shoot-em-up and mow down enemies. I can't do that in real life. (Or rather, I can, but as the results of this past week show, it's not really very much fun)
I can fly between the stars in a space sim. I can't do that in real life.
But I *can* play those songs in real life. I can also drive cars and fly planes as well, but the racing/flying games are a lot closer to real racing than guitar hero is to a real instrument. (My brother-in-law does some amateur racing and for a while had a pretty nice sim setup as well.) But learning guitar or any other instrument is a tough slog that takes years- playing a game that lets you pretend to do things that you could actually do but that take a ton of time to master seems a bit silly to those who have put in the time.
The Space Shuttle, on the other hand, is so much more complex. America is the only nation that has been able to pull it off so far.
Actually, we're one of two. The Soviet Buran did fly successfully, albeit unmanned. It probably would have worked at least as well as the shuttle -they avoided some of the mistakes on the shuttle, such as using solid rocket boosters and mounting the main engines on the shuttle itself, but the USSR ran out of cash in the late 80s.
I'm played around with it a bit, but to me it just seems like a very limited type of Second Life minus all the social stuff, scripting, interaction, etc.
Wait a minute. Isn't lack of Second Life style interaction an advantage, not a drawback?
Depends- has Notch added a penis block in Minecraft yet?
I think, as far as the fashion industry goes, the female figure they promote has more to do with how women judge women.
Half right. It has more to do with how gay men judge women- voluptuous is out, male-like (no hips, no boobs) is in. The best way to achieve that look on women is to turn them into skeletons.
Not just that, but the infrastructure you need to build is just staggeringly expensive. Cell towers are bad enough, but at least they're on earth and can be easily built and repaired. To get full satellite coverage of the earth, you either need a whole pile of satellites in LEO (Iridium uses 66 with several spares) or a couple massive ones with amazing antennas in GEO. Iridium's satellites are considered amazingly cheap, and they still run over $5 million each according to Wikipedia- that's $350 million just for the satellite hardware, and launch costs are going to triple that. Tack on running and replacement costs, the costs to design both them and the phones....
It's actually even worse than that- P&F did the press conference thing (cutting out Jones' work as well,despite some tentative agreements between BYU and Utah) and the paper that went into J. Eletroanal. Chem. was not peer reviewed at all- the editor accepted it without anything since P&F were well known to him and major publishers in the journal. Nature wasn't going to be willing to publish on the schedule P&F wanted.
I'm teaching a course in the scientific method and controversial theories this semester, and this is such a perfect example of how science is *supposed* to work. This isn't cold fusion- the original paper passed peer review and was published in Science, not exactly a bottom-feeder journal. NASA is making the organism itself available to anyone who wants it- run your own tests and see if the science stands up.
If it does- awesome. Really neat microbiology
If it doesn't- well an awful lot of published papers turn out to wrong. Acknowledge the mistake and move on.
I see comments about how peer review failed. I'm not a microbiologist so I can't judge if there were any really obvious errors, but peer review isn't supposed to verify claims in papers- it's a sanity check to make sure that nothing blatantly wrong gets through. Given that Science is the 2nd highest impact journal out there I'm sure they have competent peer reviewers available. Is it possible they screwed up? Sure, but it's not a catastrophe: we're seeing science self-correct in exactly the way it's supposed to.
Altruism is giving something of yourself. If I write a kickass piece of software or a great song, or a novel and give it away under a GPL or CC license for the rest of the world, that's altruism.
Giving away something that somebody else made and who presumably doesn't want it given away (otherwise they would have done so) is *not* altruism. You can argue theft, copyright infringement, whatever, but it is in no way comparable.
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Losing this is a *bad* thing? It might make sense on a single purpose device where you know what all the code running is doing, but on a modern computer running hundreds of tasks concurrently? Seems to me it would let you write lots of other globally available stuff too. I doubt you'd want most of it.
There are a couple of really nice uses for one of these,
As a bonus, they don't rape you on the paper- you can buy nice notebooks for a few bucks more than standard, or just print the PDF files they give you. The development kit for custom apps is free as well.
The real difference is that McCain's birth was questioned, IMMEDIATELY answered, and we moved on.
Obama's birth was questioned, the question was ignored for three years, then suddenly he decides to answer it. People wonder why he didn't answer as soon as it was questioned, and assume that he couldn't answer it then, hence the delay.
Let me fix that for you: Obama's birth was questioned, IMMEDIATELY answered to the satisfaction of his Democratic primary opponents, his Republican opponents in the general election, and the Supreme Court justice who swore him in when he presented the fully legal certificate from Hawaii. All sane people moved on. It was only not "settled" in the minds of a few pathetic trolls who can't accept the fact that a black man with a funny name might actually be allowed to sit in the Oval Office.
From *1992*. I'll admit it doesn't seem to have a grid of icons, but the Palm folks have that one pretty much covered
Back when I was teaching Chem101, I let my students bring in a 3x5 card with any formulas or notes they wanted. The final got an 8x11 sheet of paper. This solves a couple of issues- it massively reduces cheating since you're allowed (some) notes, and it forces the student to figure out what's on the card, since space is limited. Anyone who spends the time figuring that out has just done a whole pile of studying without realizing it.
And I banned calculators on PChem tests. Just write out your work, with units- I don't give a damn about the final numerical answer. (I did offer extra credit for anyone willing to use a slide rule, but could never get a taker. I even offered to provide the slide rule...)
The basic physics of rocket engines hasn't changed much at all, and can't given the limitations of the chemical fuels they use.
That's not a lot of improvement in 40 years. Sure, there are some materials improvements and better, lighter avionics, but that doesn't buy you the massive improvement you see in other high tech areas
This is not the first game to attempt this: see the (still) unreleased Guitar Rising or the open source Little Big Star, now abandoned. I saw a guitar tutor program at CES this year that also attempts it.
None work very well. I played with Little Big Star for a while with my guitar through a POD, and while it could recognize individual notes, chords were missed a lot. The CES guitar tutorial program actually sucked- I was amazed at how bad it was. They attempted to hide it by only giving you an aggregate score at the end without ever telling you *where* you made the errors, but even the salesdroids admitted that playing perfectly wouldn't get you a 100% since it couldn't recognize correct playing all the time
A) There are lots of climate change deniers out there
B) Postmodernism has caused lots of people to think that science is all relative, and the folks in A) have adopted that banner.
I'll really argue the link here- I doubt that *anyone* in A has really, seriously read the literature from B. A is comprised primarily of folks who are either highly religious and refuse to adopt a scientific worldview at all (and would be totally horrified by the philosophy of B if they actually read it) or people who have massive financial incentives to believe that climate change isn't true. The fact that A people argue against science has far more to do with those two factors than anything a bunch of academic nutcases wrote about.
But access to PLoS Biology is free. Personally, I like that model a lot more than other journals that may have low-to-zero publication fees and tens of thousands per year for a subscription to look at the content.
A: Pay a bearded guy in suspenders for hours while he incants various arcane phrases like "sudo" and "grep" and hope that he actually manages to clean up the problem at the end, or
B: Press a button and have a factory fresh install in seconds.
Assuming that you have a decent build done first (Pay the bearded guy big for that) why on earth would *anyone* pick A? It's hardly just Unix- we're a Windows shop and we're heavily virtualized because it makes sense from so many different angles- security, load balance/failover, ease of setup, etc.
Radio doesn't play the music you want to hear when you want, there's no way to skip songs you're tired of and so on.
This always cracks me up with my young kids. If I'm listening to the radio in the car, either music or NPR I often hear them pipe up from the backseat "I don't like this- skip it!" Cue the discussion about how radio works for the nth time....
Sigh. It's just impossible to use any kind of sarcasm on internet boards these days. I'd be happy for a tag, but that would never work.
Yes, You can download the Lion Developer Preview, but it requires the App Store App, and the process has been a little quirky. Good Luck!
And you can only get it in Kenya
Well, at least our President can use it then.
For example, I really like Iain Bank's work, especially his Culture stuff. Let him set up an account- I'll pay $20 for the next book and when the account gets fat enough he releases it. If you use either electronic distribution, virtually all of this goes directly to him (and his editor) so you don't need to sell all that many copies- with on-demand printers you can do limited print runs for those of us who actually like paper.
This could also work via serialization, similar to Dickens- I'll give you the first 3 chapters free, after that it gets serialized in a magazine that you have to pay for. This would be a lot better for unknown authors, since I probably won't pay $20 for someone I don't know I'll like.
I mean, I don't mind the odd sex scene but I really don't need a cheesy porno flick in the middle of the film that really has nothing to do with the plot.
Actually, while it wasn't important to the plot it was to the character development. The whole point is that Dreiberg is so messed up as a person that he's totally impotent even with his dream girl until he puts on the Night Owl suit. A big part of the entire comic series is just how badly being a "superhero" will mess with your personality- virtually none of them are fully functional human beings anymore. This too is why we needed to have the blue dong- Manhattan's increasing nudity is a sign of just how detached from humanity he's become.
Now, was it a *good* sex scene? I'm not so sure they did a great job on that one- when I rewatched the movie I fast forwarded past it since I understand the point they were trying to make, it wasn't all that interesting and there are plenty of other places to see boobs.
I think if he looks a bit more deeply it has very little to do with lock in and everything to do with the fact all the wonderful SF ideas out there simply can't be built with our current level of technology.
Brown was the real conservative in the race last year.
I can be a wizard in a fantasy game and shoot fireballs from my hands. I can't do that in real life
I can be a badass merc in a shoot-em-up and mow down enemies. I can't do that in real life. (Or rather, I can, but as the results of this past week show, it's not really very much fun)
I can fly between the stars in a space sim. I can't do that in real life.
But I *can* play those songs in real life. I can also drive cars and fly planes as well, but the racing/flying games are a lot closer to real racing than guitar hero is to a real instrument. (My brother-in-law does some amateur racing and for a while had a pretty nice sim setup as well.) But learning guitar or any other instrument is a tough slog that takes years- playing a game that lets you pretend to do things that you could actually do but that take a ton of time to master seems a bit silly to those who have put in the time.
The Space Shuttle, on the other hand, is so much more complex. America is the only nation that has been able to pull it off so far.
Actually, we're one of two. The Soviet Buran did fly successfully, albeit unmanned. It probably would have worked at least as well as the shuttle -they avoided some of the mistakes on the shuttle, such as using solid rocket boosters and mounting the main engines on the shuttle itself, but the USSR ran out of cash in the late 80s.
I'm played around with it a bit, but to me it just seems like a very limited type of Second Life minus all the social stuff, scripting, interaction, etc.
Wait a minute. Isn't lack of Second Life style interaction an advantage, not a drawback?
Depends- has Notch added a penis block in Minecraft yet?
I think, as far as the fashion industry goes, the female figure they promote has more to do with how women judge women.
Half right. It has more to do with how gay men judge women- voluptuous is out, male-like (no hips, no boobs) is in. The best way to achieve that look on women is to turn them into skeletons.
I'm honestly amazed anyone bothers.
It's actually even worse than that- P&F did the press conference thing (cutting out Jones' work as well,despite some tentative agreements between BYU and Utah) and the paper that went into J. Eletroanal. Chem. was not peer reviewed at all- the editor accepted it without anything since P&F were well known to him and major publishers in the journal. Nature wasn't going to be willing to publish on the schedule P&F wanted.
If it does- awesome. Really neat microbiology
If it doesn't- well an awful lot of published papers turn out to wrong. Acknowledge the mistake and move on.
I see comments about how peer review failed. I'm not a microbiologist so I can't judge if there were any really obvious errors, but peer review isn't supposed to verify claims in papers- it's a sanity check to make sure that nothing blatantly wrong gets through. Given that Science is the 2nd highest impact journal out there I'm sure they have competent peer reviewers available. Is it possible they screwed up? Sure, but it's not a catastrophe: we're seeing science self-correct in exactly the way it's supposed to.
Giving away something that somebody else made and who presumably doesn't want it given away (otherwise they would have done so) is *not* altruism. You can argue theft, copyright infringement, whatever, but it is in no way comparable.