Ogham is a human writeable alphabet that looks a lot like what you put in your example. I thought it was ogham at first glance. It was found on standing stones in Celtic regions (Ireland, Britain, France) and consists of a groups of 1 to 5 lines either to left, right or centered on a main line. It was supposedly also used as a sign language alphabet with the body or walking stick replacing the main line and the fingers of a hand taking the place of the letters.
This reminded me of the Minority Report Movie where the computer interface was gestural.
The differences are that Minority Report had a vertical, transparent display, not a table top but this tabletop version is definitely something different than the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, pointer) interface. The two hand select was very nice. Another feature I liked was that the voice command system did not seem to get confused when he was commenting on the steps he was taking as opposed to giving the system instructions.
Human resourcess should be a company's most important resource.
The above poster is correct, but many companies these days see resources as something to be used up and then spit out. They do not care if it is sustainable or not.
Using up employees without providing health care is like a mining company that strip mines a region. They then let a shell company declare bankruptcy rather than pay for the clean up they originally promised to provide as a condition to strip mine in the first place.
Using up employees is like a forestry company that goes into old growth forests and cuts down 500 year old trees. Even if they replant with saplings, the original value of the land will not come back during the lifetime of the whole company let alone the lifetime of the CEO.
In the article itself there is the value in the brand name of Snapper, built up through generations of producing quality goods. Walmart wanted to slap that brand on a cheaper line of junk. In the long term people would associate the "Snapper" brand with junk and so cheapen all the lines by association. Walmart wanted to strip mine the value of the brand for a quick profit.
In a similar way Walmart is strip mining the salary differential in America and places like China. Currently, Americans make more money than Chinese workers doing the same work. Walmart has stuck a spigot into the tank that is the American economy and is draining off the money to China, stopping to take their profit from the flow as it goes by. They do not care what happens when the tank empties out (or flow stops when the level just becomes even at the lowest common denominator). They are happy to make a profit NOW and forget about the future.
I believe that capitalism is a good system, but short term, next quarter oriented profit is not the way to go. There is value in long term planning, quality and brand loyalty that is not being taken into account in markets these days.
Re:Lots of innovation (a long time ago)
on
1001 Islamic Inventions
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· Score: 3, Informative
For reasons that I don't understand, the Christian and Muslim worlds seem to have flip-flopped regarding the dominance of religion vs. rational thought somewhere in the past 200-500 years. Of course this is a great over-simplification, but it's worth remembering that there was a time when the Arab world was the center of learning and enlightenment in the non-eastern-Asian world (I phrase it like that b/c I don't want to flamebait the Indians or Chinese).
I, too, find this an interesting observation and have recently read a great deal about the mediteranean world between the fall of Rome and 1000 A.D, during which Islam became a powerful force, culturally and politically and Europe declined. This period was followed by the Crusades, when European contact with Islam brought about an infusion of many of the ideas and inventions mentioned in the article. The period 1000-1500 seems to be a point at which the European and Islamic cultures were neck and neck after which the Europeans pulled ahead during the Rennaisance and the Enlightenment.
During the first period, The Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) suffered from some early defeats due to un-preparedness and bad policy decisions. Also a sort of hubris. They thought, "We're the ROMAN EMPIRE, a bunch of desert tribes can't mess with us, they'll go away if we pay them off". What happened next is key, I believe. It became a popular idea in the Eastern Roman Empire that the reason they were repeatedly defeated by the Muslims was because they had strayed from the favor of God. This is an idea they got from the Old Testemant of the Bible which on a number of occasions said that Israel was defeated (e.g. the Babylonian captivity) because the people had strayed from proper religious observance. In Byzantium people decided that icons, for example, were a violation of the rule against idol worship and that by destroying icons they would regain the favor of God thereby turning the tide and begin winning battles against the Muslims. In reality, the iconoclastic movement caused civil war further weakening Byzantium.
The tide began to turn against Islam, about 1500 ironically, just after the complete defeat and capture of Byzantium. Actually, Islam was as strong and as healthy as ever at that time but Europe began to grow and expand through exploration and experimentation and this lead to their advancement and Islam's RELATIVE decline. They began to think like the former Eastern Roman Empire. They had just conquered Constantinople (now Istanbul), their goal for 700 years, the greatest city in the world (in the Turk's mind). The rest of Europe were a bunch of barabrians by comparison and would fall eventually.
In more recent times, as you mention the last 200 years, Islam has fallen behind (really they just never advanced, they stagnated). Currently, they are looking around and saying. "Why are we not as great as we once were?" and some are coming up with the same answer the Byzantines did. Some believe that they are not religiously observant enough and that if they get fundamentalist enough they will win back the favor of God and start to defeat the West.
After 9/11 some of the American fundamentalist preachers tried to pull the same B.S. They said that 9/11 was a punishment by God because we listen to Rock and Roll and try to legalise gay marriage etc. We also have been trying to restrict the free flow of people (locking out foreign students) and ideas (the fight against teaching evolution in schools, though this is not directly connected 9/11). The point is, a resting on our laurels attitude and a turning away from cultural growth and economic expansion and towards ignorance, stagnation and fundamentalism could weaken the U.S as much as it did the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires before it.
The Byzantines, the Muslims and the American fundametalists were all wrong. What wins in the long run is openess to new ideas, economic expansion and not resting on your former glory.
Religious fundamentalism and internal fighting only weaken cultures. God won't come to our rescue if we all become vegitareans. God helps those who help themselves.
much more overview and workflow oriented approach to working with office documents that could be exceptionally powerful.
I am enthusiastic that people are working on new ways of producing documents. An application with a whole new approach might help in making encroachments on Microsoft's monopoly. However, given that Microsoft tends to "innovate" by copying other peoples' ideas, once a new approach is settled on and produced, it might be a good idea to obtain a patent and assign ownership to one of the open source groups. Workflow processes etc. should not be patentable but sadly, they are. If KOffice comes up with something truly innovative and useful, Microsoft will just replicate it in MS Office and possibly patent it itself despite the prior art. The way things are at the patent office MS could probably get away with it.
Microsoft is already adding tabbed browsing to IE after Firefox started gaining acceptance (I know Firefox did not invent it but MS didn't care about adding this feature, something I cannot live without, until Firefox started getting popular.) An office suite with a new popular and productive interface would quickly become a target for MS.
Send the soybeans to Africa where they would quite literally and without any doubt whatsoever save lives.
Actually, the US regularly produces surpluses of food. This drives down prices and hurts farmers both here and in poor countires. Using farmland to produce renewable fuels would reinvigorate the American farm which is in crisis and soak up excess production in America expanding demand in poor countries where the majority of the population are poor farmers.
Here is an article about that and a quote about farmers in poor countries that summarizes that arguement:
"It's ironic," said Kirsten Schwind, Policy Director at Food First and author of the report. "You would think cheap imported food would help alleviate hunger. But often it doesn't. It devastates the livelihoods of local farmers, who then face the choice of migrating to cities to work in sweatshops." This migration actually drives down wages in urban areas and adds to the number of poor people in cities who cannot afford even cheap food.
I think any scheme that reduces dependence on fossil fuels ( either foreign supplied or local) helps reduce the trade deficit, reduces the amount of money being sent to countries that use it to train Islamic fundamentalists and helps reduce the amount of Carbon Dioxide being put into the atmosphere something which may or may not be causing global warming which in turn is may cause droughts, extreme storms and flooding of low lying countries.
This kind of comment makes me angry. No matter what people try to do there is something wrong with it.
First, burning cow dung and other manure is a common practice throughtout the world. It is happening already. Now at least more people can get electricity from it instead of just heat and cooking.
A good thing about cow dung is that it is renewable. It is produced mostly through cows grazing on grass which grows back quickly. The CO2 that is produced will be used by that grass, a closed cycle, not like fossil fuels that add old carbon that had been in the ground for millions of years.The ash that is left over still has some utility as a fertilizer. And as I said before, it was probably already destined to be burned anyway for heat or cooking.
Now, to start complaining about things the parent post did not say and probably doesn't have a problem with but the parent post reminds me of similiar posts in the past from other people.
When Negroponte came up with the sub- $100 laptop idea everyone started bitching that what developing countries really need is clean water and cheap electricty. Now someone bitches about another person trying to solve that problem.
They say we shouldn't burn things for electricity. Use Solar power. Then someone will bitch that manufacturing solar cells uses energy and creates pollution so we should not make solar cells.
We want to reduce foreign imported oil, so someone suggests ethanol and people say that it uses natural gas and almost as much energy to create it than it delivers. Well it is true that the ferilizer to grow the corn uses chemicals derived from oil but beyond that the natural gas is just used to produce heat to create the alcohol. Anything other than natural gas can be substituted but right now natural gas is cheapest. If we wanted we could use cow manure or the alcohol that is created in the process. Ultimately we could eliminate any foreign oil or other fossil fuels from the process of creating the alcohol it is just for now it is cheaper not to.
Pretty much any solution to an energy problem gets bitched at. Hydoelectric dams rivers and hurts the fishies. Solar produce pollution during manufacture and is too expensive. Nuclear created radiactive waste. Wind generators are an eyesore, kill birds and make wooshing noises. Renewable resources like trees should not be cut down (even if they are farmed trees). It goes on and on.
There was a story here on slashdot about Bermuda using a generator sunk in the ocean running off the atlantic current. Some guy bitched that it would steal energy from the current and cause Europe to cool off.
I guess there is some part of human nature that wants to scream that humans are bad just for existing. It used to be a ignorant religious puritanical thing but more and more I hear it from the environmental granola crunchie types. Human beings and technology are bad. Anything we do is bad. Raising the standard of living of human beings is a bad goal.
The truth is that when people's standard of living goes up, their birth rate goes down. People in third world countries have 15 kids because due to water born diseases 8 or 10 of those will die before they finish growing up. The parents hope the rest will bring in some income by working. If we provide clean water, income and a higher standard of living (things this project is supposed to supply) then the birth rate will go down and the overall burden on the ecosystem will lessen. We should not keep attacking the people who try to fix these problems. We should spend our energy producing a better solution if their solutions are not good enough.
You are right in saying that this is not enough energy to maintain an orbit. According to spaceelevator.com You would come off the cable at 3.1 km/sec and would need a booster to bring you up to enough speed to maintain Low Earth Orbit at 7.7km/sec.
But you saved on the lower stage and you don't have to worry about atmosphere anymore, so it would be a good Shuttle replacement. Even now when a sattelite is released from the shuttle, a booster is required if you want to get it to a higher orbit. On the other hand if the elevator is ever built low Earth orbit will probably not be used that much anymore. It may in fact be dangerous to have things that may hit the cable and most things would be brought to geosynchronous orbit.
Actually, the counter weight is at 62,000 miles. That can be launched by conventional rocket to 32,000 and the tether let off in both directions from there. As was pointed out elsewhere, the tether is the hard part. These guys have a mile long tether so I guess your comment is legitimate.
All the climber (elvevator car) needs to do is go up to 100 miles to do what the space shuttle does and only 62 miles to do what Spaceship-One did. So in the case of the climber part it is 1 down and 99 to go.
that most of the baddies already know when the intelligence satellites are going to be overhead, and adjust their activities accordingly if they don't want to be directly observed.
Well then what we should do is send up a bunch of fake satellites, reflective balloons, spaced out so that one is always overhead in every hostile country in the world. Every rocket that sends up a real satellite could have 2 or 3 balloons too. Maybe throw a thruster on the balloons to shuffle them around like a shell game to throw off anyone trying to see which is which. The baddies will either assume that all the satellites they do see are fake and so give up trying to hide or else they will give up doing bad things.
(given the abundance of space junk already in orbit I am sure this is not advisable and is posted in jest).
The reason why 3D interfaces aren't really that useful is that you really need a 3D input device to make use of it. But the trouble is, the way our bodies are built, it's very tiring to wave our hands around all day long.
You don't wave your hands around all day ?? You obviously ain't from New Yawk.
Everyone around here talks with their hands!
Ya gotta be an idiot not to understand that hand gestures and facial expressions convey a lot of information.
A while back...was it yesterday??
No.. no.. no.. further back.. last year.
Anyway, I saw a whole arguement in New York between two guys at street level while I was up about 19 floors looking out a window. I could tell exactly what was going on without hearing a word. I just followed the hand gestures and body language.
Well, I look forward to an interface that reads gestures. I've been berated by teachers and others about using my hands too much while talking. I often act as if there is a blackboard behind me when explaining complicated things. I draw diagrams with my fingertips in the air and later point to things I've "drawn" earlier even though neither I nor the person I am explaining things too can see these diagrams. It would be great if we were both using an augmented reality interface that would actually let me draw in thin air and record the digrams and display it to everyone in the conversation.
IV Meat is still worth a read though, it's a cyberpunk fantasy come true.
In vitro meat is cool but it is much older than cyberpunk. C.M. Kornbluth and Frederick Pohl wrote a book in 1953 called "The Space Merchants" where corporations run the world and people are manipulated by constant advertising (Lucky we dodged that possible future, huh?). Anyway, one of the products that plays a role in the story is "Chicken Little" a chicken substitute made from a slab of tissue grown in a vat.
And a relevant quote from near the bottom of the summary/article:
One of the great, classic images of this book is Chicken Little--a neatly packaged, popular meat product that's actually a gigantic, living mass of vat-grown tissue fed and processed at the Chlorella plantation.
Off topic I always wondered about post WWII suburbs: Right after WWII, a war marked by bombings of cities with both nuclear and convential bombs from both sides (London Blitz, firebombing of Dresden, Hiroshima & Nagasaki among many,many others) that the U.S. built its highway system and also developed suburbs all along the highways. The suburbs made it harder to wipe out a city's population as they were now more spread out. This probably helped national security though I do not know if suburbs were a deliberate plan or just happened.
Now, the very fact that most post WWII construction was spread out and depends on automobiles is harmful to National Security because it increases our dependence on foreign oil supplied by nations hostile to US and US policies.
I once read a nice article by Isaac Asimov about this spelling thing.I do not remember which of the hundreds of books he wrote the article was in but it is out there somewhere. I am doing this from memory but the story goes like this: It seems the roots of most metals are like this: magnesia.....so magnesium potassia.....so potassium
But the root of aluminum is alumina, no 'i'. The British stuck one in anyway for consistency because all the other metals have it. The American English version is more correct, according to Asimov but he was an American citizen so he might be biased.
First, for the grandparent poster. There are currently 2 people assigned to each train. Automated trains will still have 1.
Now for the parent:
"The skytrain doors have this magical bizarre ability to stop closing if resistance is met,"
NYC subway cars are closed manually. I have not RTFA but I am sure they will never be like elevator doors that reopen if they meet resistance.
Here's why: currently one of the major sources of delays in the NYC system come from people jamming something in the closing doors so that the train will not leave the station. Conductors and potential passenger then engage in a struggle of will with the conductor trying to open the door enough to let the person remove the briefcase but not enough to let the potential passenger on the train, thus rewarding his bad behavior.
If could actually stop the train then one person would run down the stairs late and jam their briefcase in the door. It would open and the person would get on. Before it got a chance to close again, another person would run down the stairs and repeat the process. NYC is so busy that in many stations this process could go on indefinitely and the train would never leave the station. One stuck train would back up the whole line.
At one point in the article a student prays to Mary and wonders what a better patron saint would be for underwater robotics.
I checked here and found that, though there is no patron saint of robotics there is a saint of the Internet, computers and computer technicians (Isidore of Seville)
A good saint for them to pray to next time (or maybe MIT can pray to) would be Erasmus who is listed as the saint for watermen, sailors, mariners and seasickness.
Second of all, when I was tutoring students on how to write their program assignments I used to take the assignment and tell them that all the nouns in the specification were meant to be objects and all the verbs were methods. The students did not know what a noun and a verb were and I would end up underlining them for them.
Finally, people can barely write clear understandable English:
"In addition to helping programmers visualize their program better, I think it also promotes writing concise (and therefore) requirements and descriptions."
"...writing concise (and therefore) requirements and descriptions"? I guess the submitter meant "and therefore better" or some other qualifier (which Metafor would try to turn into a property of the object "requirements").
Both Slashdot and users of Metafor need to have editors go over all input submitted to them.
This past Sunday was not the first Sunday in Lent, it was the last Sunday (Palm Sunday) at least according to the Catholic Church but icons and iconoclasts were a big Eastern Orthodox issue and maybe you are referring to Greek Easter so your dates could be right.
>>Surely you called the credit card company first?
Yes I called. You call and they tell you take the card and cut it up or turn it into your supervisor. They also tell you to not interfere with the "customer". In the few cases where I was told to confiscate the card the "customer" was obviously not the card owner. I think I remember handing the phone to one guy so he could talk to the CC company. The customer never got irate. They often just smiled and walked away. The CC company would send the store a check for $25 or $50 to give to the cashier who turned in the stolen card. I think Amex used to give $50. We were never told to interfere with the fraudulent cardholder. This was all 15 or more years ago. I am not sure if the policy has changed.
I was a clerk in a video store and a cashier at a department store while working my way through school. I would check all Credit Card signatures. Credit cards were required for membership at the video store, most people would pay cash for the rentals.
I confiscated 3 or 4 cards and destroyed them while a cashier after getting "Please Call" back instead of an authorization.
I never caught a bad signature (a couple missing signatures, I would check the Driver's license and look at that signature and photo and tell the person to sign the card later)
I would occasionally get a customer that did not want me to bother checking signatures and one guy belittled me while I was checking. "Oh, now you are a handwriting expert. Oh, how secure." etc etc.
I told him it was better for him that I at least try to catch forgers.
Not really useful to the discussion but that guy still bugs me when I think about it. I was trying to protect his credit not inconvenience him. No wonder clerks don't bother to check.
What I got from this article is that throughout history people who try to make money from the old media try to fight people who try to make money from the new media. Artists make only a small amount of money from either. The only advantage the artist has is that the new media plays to a larger audience and the artist, because he gets a smaller slice from a larger pie tend to do OK. The media companies, old and new do OK also but that's besides the point...
The lawyers always get paid.
They get paid by the old companies to fight the new companies and they get paid by the new companies to defend against the old companies and they get paid by the artists to make sure they get their cut.
History teaches us that it doesn't pay to be a creative artist, inventor or even business man.
Kids, be a lawyer and get all the others coming and going.:)
Plans to build PC like computers from parts of other Consumer electronic devices are needed.
If the generic PC is outlawed and Microsoft is able to push through DRM encumbered hardware as a new standard, it might be a good idea to be able to open up an old Tivo-like DRM laden device, a console like the X-box or a HDTV and use the parts to make a PC.
I know that the Tivo and Xbox are really just computers today and they can be hacked, but in the future laws or manufacturers may make this more difficult. It would be great if we could build our own PC's from parts and circumvent stupid laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Ogham is a human writeable alphabet that looks a lot like what you put in your example. I thought it was ogham at first glance. It was found on standing stones in Celtic regions (Ireland, Britain, France) and consists of a groups of 1 to 5 lines either to left, right or centered on a main line. It was supposedly also used as a sign language alphabet with the body or walking stick replacing the main line and the fingers of a hand taking the place of the letters.
Here is the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham
Here is a more concise article:
http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ogham/
This reminded me of the Minority Report Movie where the computer interface was gestural.
The differences are that Minority Report had a vertical, transparent display, not a table top but this tabletop version is definitely something different than the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, pointer) interface. The two hand select was very nice. Another feature I liked was that the voice command system did not seem to get confused when he was commenting on the steps he was taking as opposed to giving the system instructions.
"The way to get the risk down is to use hands-free," he told Reuters.
Wouldn't hands free just move the radiation exposure from your head down to your belt area and crotch?
I am not sure which is better, brain cancer or cancer of the crotch.
Human resourcess should be a company's most important resource.
The above poster is correct, but many companies these days see resources as something to be used up and then spit out. They do not care if it is sustainable or not.
Using up employees without providing health care is like a mining company that strip mines a region. They then let a shell company declare bankruptcy rather than pay for the clean up they originally promised to provide as a condition to strip mine in the first place.
Using up employees is like a forestry company that goes into old growth forests and cuts down 500 year old trees. Even if they replant with saplings, the original value of the land will not come back during the lifetime of the whole company let alone the lifetime of the CEO.
In the article itself there is the value in the brand name of Snapper, built up through generations of producing quality goods. Walmart wanted to slap that brand on a cheaper line of junk. In the long term people would associate the "Snapper" brand with junk and so cheapen all the lines by association. Walmart wanted to strip mine the value of the brand for a quick profit.
In a similar way Walmart is strip mining the salary differential in America and places like China. Currently, Americans make more money than Chinese workers doing the same work. Walmart has stuck a spigot into the tank that is the American economy and is draining off the money to China, stopping to take their profit from the flow as it goes by. They do not care what happens when the tank empties out (or flow stops when the level just becomes even at the lowest common denominator). They are happy to make a profit NOW and forget about the future.
I believe that capitalism is a good system, but short term, next quarter oriented profit is not the way to go. There is value in long term planning, quality and brand loyalty that is not being taken into account in markets these days.
For reasons that I don't understand, the Christian and Muslim worlds seem to have flip-flopped regarding the dominance of religion vs. rational thought somewhere in the past 200-500 years. Of course this is a great over-simplification, but it's worth remembering that there was a time when the Arab world was the center of learning and enlightenment in the non-eastern-Asian world (I phrase it like that b/c I don't want to flamebait the Indians or Chinese).
I, too, find this an interesting observation and have recently read a great deal about the mediteranean world between the fall of Rome and 1000 A.D, during which Islam became a powerful force, culturally and politically and Europe declined. This period was followed by the Crusades, when European contact with Islam brought about an infusion of many of the ideas and inventions mentioned in the article. The period 1000-1500 seems to be a point at which the European and Islamic cultures were neck and neck after which the Europeans pulled ahead during the Rennaisance and the Enlightenment.
During the first period, The Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) suffered from some early defeats due to un-preparedness and bad policy decisions. Also a sort of hubris. They thought, "We're the ROMAN EMPIRE, a bunch of desert tribes can't mess with us, they'll go away if we pay them off". What happened next is key, I believe. It became a popular idea in the Eastern Roman Empire that the reason they were repeatedly defeated by the Muslims was because they had strayed from the favor of God. This is an idea they got from the Old Testemant of the Bible which on a number of occasions said that Israel was defeated (e.g. the Babylonian captivity) because the people had strayed from proper religious observance. In Byzantium people decided that icons, for example, were a violation of the rule against idol worship and that by destroying icons they would regain the favor of God thereby turning the tide and begin winning battles against the Muslims. In reality, the iconoclastic movement caused civil war further weakening Byzantium.
The tide began to turn against Islam, about 1500 ironically, just after the complete defeat and capture of Byzantium. Actually, Islam was as strong and as healthy as ever at that time but Europe began to grow and expand through exploration and experimentation and this lead to their advancement and Islam's RELATIVE decline. They began to think like the former Eastern Roman Empire. They had just conquered Constantinople (now Istanbul), their goal for 700 years, the greatest city in the world (in the Turk's mind). The rest of Europe were a bunch of barabrians by comparison and would fall eventually.
In more recent times, as you mention the last 200 years, Islam has fallen behind (really they just never advanced, they stagnated). Currently, they are looking around and saying. "Why are we not as great as we once were?" and some are coming up with the same answer the Byzantines did. Some believe that they are not religiously observant enough and that if they get fundamentalist enough they will win back the favor of God and start to defeat the West.
After 9/11 some of the American fundamentalist preachers tried to pull the same B.S. They said that 9/11 was a punishment by God because we listen to Rock and Roll and try to legalise gay marriage etc. We also have been trying to restrict the free flow of people (locking out foreign students) and ideas (the fight against teaching evolution in schools, though this is not directly connected 9/11). The point is, a resting on our laurels attitude and a turning away from cultural growth and economic expansion and towards ignorance, stagnation and fundamentalism could weaken the U.S as much as it did the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires before it.
The Byzantines, the Muslims and the American fundametalists were all wrong. What wins in the long run is openess to new ideas, economic expansion and not resting on your former glory.
Religious fundamentalism and internal fighting only weaken cultures. God won't come to our rescue if we all become vegitareans. God helps those who help themselves.
much more overview and workflow oriented approach to working with office documents that could be exceptionally powerful.
I am enthusiastic that people are working on new ways of producing documents. An application with a whole new approach might help in making encroachments on Microsoft's monopoly. However, given that Microsoft tends to "innovate" by copying other peoples' ideas, once a new approach is settled on and produced, it might be a good idea to obtain a patent and assign ownership to one of the open source groups. Workflow processes etc. should not be patentable but sadly, they are. If KOffice comes up with something truly innovative and useful, Microsoft will just replicate it in MS Office and possibly patent it itself despite the prior art. The way things are at the patent office MS could probably get away with it.
Microsoft is already adding tabbed browsing to IE after Firefox started gaining acceptance (I know Firefox did not invent it but MS didn't care about adding this feature, something I cannot live without, until Firefox started getting popular.) An office suite with a new popular and productive interface would quickly become a target for MS.
Send the soybeans to Africa where they would quite literally and without any doubt whatsoever save lives.
Actually, the US regularly produces surpluses of food. This drives down prices and hurts farmers both here and in poor countires. Using farmland to produce renewable fuels would reinvigorate the American farm which is in crisis and soak up excess production in America expanding demand in poor countries where the majority of the population are poor farmers.
Here is an article about that and a quote about farmers in poor countries that summarizes that arguement:
"It's ironic," said Kirsten Schwind, Policy Director at Food First and author of the report. "You would think cheap imported food would help alleviate hunger. But often it doesn't. It devastates the livelihoods of local farmers, who then face the choice of migrating to cities to work in sweatshops." This migration actually drives down wages in urban areas and adds to the number of poor people in cities who cannot afford even cheap food.
I think any scheme that reduces dependence on fossil fuels ( either foreign supplied or local) helps reduce the trade deficit, reduces the amount of money being sent to countries that use it to train Islamic fundamentalists and helps reduce the amount of Carbon Dioxide being put into the atmosphere something which may or may not be causing global warming which in turn is may cause droughts, extreme storms and flooding of low lying countries.
This kind of comment makes me angry. No matter what people try to do there is something wrong with it.
First, burning cow dung and other manure is a common practice throughtout the world. It is happening already. Now at least more people can get electricity from it instead of just heat and cooking.
A good thing about cow dung is that it is renewable. It is produced mostly through cows grazing on grass which grows back quickly. The CO2 that is produced will be used by that grass, a closed cycle, not like fossil fuels that add old carbon that had been in the ground for millions of years.The ash that is left over still has some utility as a fertilizer. And as I said before, it was probably already destined to be burned anyway for heat or cooking.
Now, to start complaining about things the parent post did not say and probably doesn't have a problem with but the parent post reminds me of similiar posts in the past from other people.
When Negroponte came up with the sub- $100 laptop idea everyone started bitching that what developing countries really need is clean water and cheap electricty. Now someone bitches about another person trying to solve that problem.
They say we shouldn't burn things for electricity. Use Solar power. Then someone will bitch that manufacturing solar cells uses energy and creates pollution so we should not make solar cells.
We want to reduce foreign imported oil, so someone suggests ethanol and people say that it uses natural gas and almost as much energy to create it than it delivers. Well it is true that the ferilizer to grow the corn uses chemicals derived from oil but beyond that the natural gas is just used to produce heat to create the alcohol. Anything other than natural gas can be substituted but right now natural gas is cheapest. If we wanted we could use cow manure or the alcohol that is created in the process. Ultimately we could eliminate any foreign oil or other fossil fuels from the process of creating the alcohol it is just for now it is cheaper not to.
Pretty much any solution to an energy problem gets bitched at. Hydoelectric dams rivers and hurts the fishies. Solar produce pollution during manufacture and is too expensive. Nuclear created radiactive waste. Wind generators are an eyesore, kill birds and make wooshing noises. Renewable resources like trees should not be cut down (even if they are farmed trees). It goes on and on.
There was a story here on slashdot about Bermuda using a generator sunk in the ocean running off the atlantic current. Some guy bitched that it would steal energy from the current and cause Europe to cool off.
I guess there is some part of human nature that wants to scream that humans are bad just for existing. It used to be a ignorant religious puritanical thing but more and more I hear it from the environmental granola crunchie types. Human beings and technology are bad. Anything we do is bad. Raising the standard of living of human beings is a bad goal.
The truth is that when people's standard of living goes up, their birth rate goes down. People in third world countries have 15 kids because due to water born diseases 8 or 10 of those will die before they finish growing up. The parents hope the rest will bring in some income by working. If we provide clean water, income and a higher standard of living (things this project is supposed to supply) then the birth rate will go down and the overall burden on the ecosystem will lessen. We should not keep attacking the people who try to fix these problems. We should spend our energy producing a better solution if their solutions are not good enough.
You are right in saying that this is not enough energy to maintain an orbit. According to spaceelevator.com You would come off the cable at 3.1 km/sec and would need a booster to bring you up to enough speed to maintain Low Earth Orbit at 7.7km/sec.
But you saved on the lower stage and you don't have to worry about atmosphere anymore, so it would be a good Shuttle replacement. Even now when a sattelite is released from the shuttle, a booster is required if you want to get it to a higher orbit. On the other hand if the elevator is ever built low Earth orbit will probably not be used that much anymore. It may in fact be dangerous to have things that may hit the cable and most things would be brought to geosynchronous orbit.
Actually, the counter weight is at 62,000 miles. That can be launched by conventional rocket to 32,000 and the tether let off in both directions from there. As was pointed out elsewhere, the tether is the hard part. These guys have a mile long tether so I guess your comment is legitimate.
All the climber (elvevator car) needs to do is go up to 100 miles to do what the space shuttle does and only 62 miles to do what Spaceship-One did. So in the case of the climber part it is 1 down and 99 to go.
that most of the baddies already know when the intelligence satellites are going to be overhead, and adjust their activities accordingly if they don't want to be directly observed.
Well then what we should do is send up a bunch of fake satellites, reflective balloons, spaced out so that one is always overhead in every hostile country in the world. Every rocket that sends up a real satellite could have 2 or 3 balloons too. Maybe throw a thruster on the balloons to shuffle them around like a shell game to throw off anyone trying to see which is which. The baddies will either assume that all the satellites they do see are fake and so give up trying to hide or else they will give up doing bad things.
(given the abundance of space junk already in orbit I am sure this is not advisable and is posted in jest).
The reason why 3D interfaces aren't really that useful is that you really need a 3D input device to make use of it. But the trouble is, the way our bodies are built, it's very tiring to wave our hands around all day long.
You don't wave your hands around all day ?? You obviously ain't from New Yawk.
Everyone around here talks with their hands!
Ya gotta be an idiot not to understand that hand gestures and facial expressions convey a lot of information.
A while back...was it yesterday??
No.. no.. no.. further back.. last year.
Anyway, I saw a whole arguement in New York between two guys at street level while I was up about 19 floors looking out a window. I could tell exactly what was going on without hearing a word. I just followed the hand gestures and body language.
Well, I look forward to an interface that reads gestures. I've been berated by teachers and others about using my hands too much while talking. I often act as if there is a blackboard behind me when explaining complicated things. I draw diagrams with my fingertips in the air and later point to things I've "drawn" earlier even though neither I nor the person I am explaining things too can see these diagrams. It would be great if we were both using an augmented reality interface that would actually let me draw in thin air and record the digrams and display it to everyone in the conversation.
In vitro meat is cool but it is much older than cyberpunk. C.M. Kornbluth and Frederick Pohl wrote a book in 1953 called "The Space Merchants" where corporations run the world and people are manipulated by constant advertising (Lucky we dodged that possible future, huh?). Anyway, one of the products that plays a role in the story is "Chicken Little" a chicken substitute made from a slab of tissue grown in a vat.
Here is a website with a summary
And a relevant quote from near the bottom of the summary/article:
One of the great, classic images of this book is Chicken Little--a neatly packaged, popular meat product that's actually a gigantic, living mass of vat-grown tissue fed and processed at the Chlorella plantation.
Off topic I always wondered about post WWII suburbs:
Right after WWII, a war marked by bombings of cities with both nuclear and convential bombs from both sides (London Blitz, firebombing of Dresden, Hiroshima & Nagasaki among many,many others) that the U.S. built its highway system and also developed suburbs all along the highways. The suburbs made it harder to wipe out a city's population as they were now more spread out. This probably helped national security though I do not know if suburbs were a deliberate plan or just happened.
Now, the very fact that most post WWII construction was spread out and depends on automobiles is harmful to National Security because it increases our dependence on foreign oil supplied by nations hostile to US and US policies.
I once read a nice article by Isaac Asimov about this spelling thing.I do not remember which of the hundreds of books he wrote the article was in but it is out there somewhere. I am doing this from memory but the story goes like this:
It seems the roots of most metals are like this:
magnesia.....so magnesium
potassia.....so potassium
But the root of aluminum is alumina, no 'i'. The British stuck one in anyway for consistency because all the other metals have it. The American English version is more correct, according to Asimov but he was an American citizen so he might be biased.
For simple songs and melodies there are various utilities that use abc music notation.
Here is a page listing them: http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/
This lets you enter music using letters and other utilities will convert it into midi or wav files.
Something similiar and free is the Guido system. It is designed to handle more complicated pieces:
http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/AFS/GUIDO/
Another free system is Rosegarden:http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
The jedi religion is just as real as any other, IMO, except perhaps better written.
As well written as the romantic dialogue in Episodes 1,2,3? :)
First, for the grandparent poster. There are currently 2 people assigned to each train. Automated trains will still have 1.
Now for the parent:
"The skytrain doors have this magical bizarre ability to stop closing if resistance is met,"
NYC subway cars are closed manually. I have not RTFA but I am sure they will never be like elevator doors that reopen if they meet resistance.
Here's why: currently one of the major sources of delays in the NYC system come from people jamming something in the closing doors so that the train will not leave the station. Conductors and potential passenger then engage in a struggle of will with the conductor trying to open the door enough to let the person remove the briefcase but not enough to let the potential passenger on the train, thus rewarding his bad behavior.
If could actually stop the train then one person would run down the stairs late and jam their briefcase in the door. It would open and the person would get on. Before it got a chance to close again, another person would run down the stairs and repeat the process. NYC is so busy that in many stations this process could go on indefinitely and the train would never leave the station. One stuck train would back up the whole line.
At one point in the article a student prays to Mary and wonders what a better patron saint would be for underwater robotics.
I checked here and found that, though there is no patron saint of robotics there is a saint of the Internet, computers and computer technicians (Isidore of Seville)
A good saint for them to pray to next time (or maybe MIT can pray to) would be Erasmus who is listed as the saint for watermen, sailors, mariners and seasickness.
First of all dupe.
Second of all, when I was tutoring students on how to write their program assignments I used to take the assignment and tell them that all the nouns in the specification were meant to be objects and all the verbs were methods. The students did not know what a noun and a verb were and I would end up underlining them for them.
Finally, people can barely write clear understandable English:
"...writing concise (and therefore) requirements and descriptions"? I guess the submitter meant "and therefore better" or some other qualifier (which Metafor would try to turn into a property of the object "requirements").
Both Slashdot and users of Metafor need to have editors go over all input submitted to them.
This past Sunday was not the first Sunday in Lent, it was the last Sunday (Palm Sunday) at least according to the Catholic Church but icons and iconoclasts were a big Eastern Orthodox issue and maybe you are referring to Greek Easter so your dates could be right.
>>Surely you called the credit card company first?
Yes I called. You call and they tell you take the card and cut it up or turn it into your supervisor. They also tell you to not interfere with the "customer". In the few cases where I was told to confiscate the card the "customer" was obviously not the card owner. I think I remember handing the phone to one guy so he could talk to the CC company. The customer never got irate. They often just smiled and walked away. The CC company would send the store a check for $25 or $50 to give to the cashier who turned in the stolen card. I think Amex used to give $50. We were never told to interfere with the fraudulent cardholder. This was all 15 or more years ago. I am not sure if the policy has changed.
I was a clerk in a video store and a cashier at a department store while working my way through school. I would check all Credit Card signatures. Credit cards were required for membership at the video store, most people would pay cash for the rentals.
I confiscated 3 or 4 cards and destroyed them while a cashier after getting "Please Call" back instead of an authorization.
I never caught a bad signature (a couple missing signatures, I would check the Driver's license and look at that signature and photo and tell the person to sign the card later)
I would occasionally get a customer that did not want me to bother checking signatures and one guy belittled me while I was checking. "Oh, now you are a handwriting expert. Oh, how secure." etc etc.
I told him it was better for him that I at least try to catch forgers.
Not really useful to the discussion but that guy still bugs me when I think about it. I was trying to protect his credit not inconvenience him. No wonder clerks don't bother to check.
What I got from this article is that throughout history people who try to make money from the old media try to fight people who try to make money from the new media. Artists make only a small amount of money from either. The only advantage the artist has is that the new media plays to a larger audience and the artist, because he gets a smaller slice from a larger pie tend to do OK. The media companies, old and new do OK also but that's besides the point...
:)
The lawyers always get paid.
They get paid by the old companies to fight the new companies and they get paid by the new companies to defend against the old companies and they get paid by the artists to make sure they get their cut.
History teaches us that it doesn't pay to be a creative artist, inventor or even business man.
Kids, be a lawyer and get all the others coming and going.
Plans to build PC like computers from parts of other Consumer electronic devices are needed.
If the generic PC is outlawed and Microsoft is able to push through DRM encumbered hardware as a new standard, it might be a good idea to be able to open up an old Tivo-like DRM laden device, a console like the X-box or a HDTV and use the parts to make a PC.
I know that the Tivo and Xbox are really just computers today and they can be hacked, but in the future laws or manufacturers may make this more difficult. It would be great if we could build our own PC's from parts and circumvent stupid laws.