I had a PET (actually a CBM 8008) - and yeah, the PET design resembled an original iMac in that it was a single sealed case: VDU, cassette recorder, keyboard. So not very tinkerable at all.
What was amazing was just how the PET *was* hacked regardless - like the infamous 'CB2 sound', where the second (unused) cassette recorder tone generator was used with some circuitry to make music.
And if you didn't realize it farming is destined for space.
How, exactly? Can you grow plants on bare rock and vacuum?
Because if you can, there's plenty of land in Australia and the Sahara - with bonus extra oxygen and water - on which you could use those same techniques, for far cheaper.
I wish people could get it thru their head that we are not launching stacks of 100 dollar bills into space. Every last red cent is spent here on earth.
That's true, but meaningless - because *all* money spent on *anything*, good or bad, is spent 'right here on Earth', by definition. That includes the $1 Trillion baseline spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, and the $8+ Trillion spent on the bank bailout.
If I airdropped a billion dollars of $10 bills over a major US city, that would also be spent right here on Earth.
And yes the funds for space were spent paying very smart people to do very clever things involving rocket engines. But being smart and being a smart use of resources aren't the same thing.
I could pay a billion dollars to a guy to build a model of the Empire State Building out of toothpicks, and that would be a very challenging and inspiring task. And it would have spinoff effects for the local economy, for toothpick salesmen, for the media.
But is that a billion dollars that could have been spent *better*? And do we need so many very clever toothpick engineers?
What's the *actual*, direct result of space investment, not the spinoffs?
It is a good thing that our ancestors weren't so pessimistic about exploration. Bonus points to whomever realized that colonizing space doesn't involve enslaving the natives.
Slavery and tobacco are what built the New World colony fleets... that, and local breathable oxygen, water, gravity, no radiation, and a whole DNA-compatible biosphere.
Got any of those in space? Europa, maybe? Better not get too close to Jupiter's radiation belt, though.
And, of course - should we ever succeed in building a stable space biosphere module, we could always replicate that same module for far cheaper on Earth, with all the same benefits of the 'omg saving humanity by dispersing it' argument.
It's just that most people don't WANT to live in hermetically sealed metal boxes or fallout shelters. But a fallout shelter after the worst nuclear apocalypse would be a lot more livable environment than a standalone space colony on Mars.
Or contracts to "Not send asteroids on collision course with Earth" in exchange for whatever the "Coalition of Independent Space Colonies" want.
Which contract will soon be followed by Her Majesty's Royal Space Marines blowing the living daylights out of the Independent Space Colonies, replacing them with automated nuke silos, and retreating back down-well to where there's oxygen.
Or more likely, just cutting their weekly food-for-poo Progress ships, turning off their Internet feed and denying them any more update patches for their nuclear reactor control computer, and leaving them to starve/meltdown.
Living in space doesn't magically give you unlimited energy, superintelligence and a stable biosphere, regardless of what Heinlein may have thought. Our current 'space colonies' are totally dependent on lifesupport from Earth. It will be a while before we get to even 'can live a year without supplies' let alone 'can blow up Earth and not notice'.
"even vat grown organs airdropped to wherever you need them"
If you can vat-grow organs in the first place, whyever would you choose to grow them in *space* where the gravity field is wonky and muscles and bones atrophy? Cheaper and healthier all round to just deploy that same technology on Earth.
Space is not a place where things are magically better. It's a place where things are harder, deadlier, worse, more expensive, break more, and you have to bring even your oxygen with you.
The only thing space has more of is sunlight, vacuum, and microgravity. Which are worth... what, exactly?
"little more than a few trillion tons of metal, ceramics, volatiles and a few million tons of precious metals"
Sure... but can you mine them in clunky vacuum suits or robots and return them to Earth on single-use chemical rockets for cheaper than just mining them on Earth? And will there be an endless demand for exotic metal ores on an Earth struggling with biosphere depletion and lack of fresh water, food and oxygen?
Our ideas of value are all relative. Gold seems like it's a valuable commodity on the market now because it's rare, but it's not actually that *valuable* compared to H2O, if you know what I mean. You might have better luck mining comets for water.
And rockets are expensive. OTOH, you could de-orbit a few trillion tons of metal ore or ice quite cheaply if you didn't mind leaving a large crater and a planetwide extinction event...
If you build a cheap gravity drive then yes, you could cut the cost of mining space. But if you could do that you could also do a whole lot of other things than go into space.
Actually.... there have been people rather like Batman in the 1930s era. Private millionaires who bankrolled much of WW2 military R&D.
Look up Howard Hughes, Alfred Loomis, Floyd Odlum, William Stephenson, 'Wild Bill' Donovan. Those boys got up to interesting stuff, sometimes working for 'the government' and sometimes on their own time (and dime). They weren't all friends of Hoover and FDR.
And to be honest, that heritage still exists today. Some of the same types of characters surfaced in teams Nixon, Reagan and Bush. Private military contractors, private defense contractors. Wackenhut/Group4, Blackwater/XE, KBR, Halliburton...
However, we have managed to clone things that old in the past! The record is a bacterium from 250 mya. Pretty impressive.
In other news, the mysterious illness causing all staff of a local genetic research lab to be quarantined continues to spread. Authorities say there is no cause for alarm, but requested that all citizens stock up on shotgun ammo and 10,000 volt electric fences "to celebrate the end of the recession". When asked for a comment, an InGen executive raised his crest feathers, bared his dorsal spine, and told this reporter, "Raaaaaarrrrgggh!"
"Wouldn't the vast sum of money required be better spent preserving the rainforests here on earth?"
It probably would, but preserving the rainforests is a tough problem involving political and business corruption, where it's not at all clear what to spend money on - giving money to any organisation involved in the Amazon is as likely as not to make matters worse, since they're probably already turning a blind eye to logging.
John Derbyshire wrote an insightful article detailing a number of reasons why. I think he's hit it on the head.
That would be the article where he says this?
It starts you down the path to true wisdom—the "fixed incredulity" that Mrs. Thrale remarked on in the character of Dr. Johnson. (It took Johnson's friends six months to persuade him that reports of the great Lisbon earthquake were true. He was, said one of them, "the last man on earth to whom one should bring a wonder.")
Why does he think such hard-core skepticism as represented in Dr Johnson's six-month lag in accepting the reality of a simple earthquake is "the path to true wisdom"?
Doesn't give me much confidence in his views on science.
Further to this, the biggest problem I have with GUIs is what I would describe as a 'lack of reification'.
Everything we do on a computer is a command. CLIs store these as text lines in scripts. GUIs have 'events' which are commands. But by design, they do not expose these events to the user. IMO, this is a mistake.
A truly humane GUI would record all the commands initiated by the user and save them as interactable objects of some kind. Perhaps like Facebook's 'events' list, you would be able to see the last things you did, and point at them and say 'undo this' or 'save this as a script'.
Reification - being able to turn verbs into nouns - is a fundamental feature of human language. Our interaction with computers, whether textual or graphical, does take the form of speech. We're deliberately crippling our language in GUIs by having invisible 'verbs' which cannot be interacted with.
Drag and drop was always a bad UI idea, IMO. You have an action which forces you to move a mouse a fair distance, then drop it onto a small target, while holding the button depressed. This causes lots of muscle strain. Worse, if you twitch and hit the wrong target, you may now have initiated an action (such as move a file) onto the wrong target with not only unintended consequences, but consequences which you don't know what they are and the system does not tell you.
How many times has a non-technical user 'lost' a file by accidentally finger-twitching and dropping it into the wrong folder? On the command line, you could rm -rf, but if you did at least you had a visual record of EXACTLY what went wrong.
Not in the GUI world, not in drag-and-drop. This is a bug, not a feature.
Yes, definitely. For example, a weird UI thing: why, by default, can you not tab over the buttons of a dialog? Why are there no accelerator keys for menus? This seems to be deliberately making a product unfriendly to people who use the keyboard. The IBM CUA guidelines, on which Windows was based, have been out since the late 1980s - yet OSX users seem to think that using the mouse constantly is a feature, or at least a requirement, of a modern GUI.
"Artists use macs because the design of the UI is the nicest thing out there. "
The LOOK of the UI is nice, yes.
The actual DESIGN of it - how it operates - not nearly so much. Seriously, the Dock? Where you can't tell without squinting whether a program is running or not?
Please stop using the word "design" to mean "superficial visual appearance" rather than "function".
What confuses and frustrates me is: when did the word "design" change from meaning "the stuff that makes a machine actually work right and be suitable for task" to "the replaceable plastic bling on the outside of a box which makes it look pretty"?
Used to be, a "designer" was someone who knew how things worked and planned how to build things... now for some reason it means the person who picks out the paint after the engineers have finished their job.
"And that argument would fail because it's fundamentally incorrect."
Incorrect by what definition? The arbitrary whims of law, or by the actual physical reality of what information versus matter is?
Society can pass whatever laws they want, but law can't make something which is physically INCORRECT 'correct'.
Information can be copied without losing value - in fact it gains value in the process. Matter can not.
Property is the ownership - spatial localisation and control - of matter.
Information cannot be 'property' because the laws of physics say it just ain't so.
Information can only be controlled (and bought and sold and rented) LIKE property if we willingly engage in a massive society-wide fiction such that everyone with an ear and a mouth (or a computer) willingly or unwillingly restrict their natural rights to listen and speak. This apparatus of control imposes a huge cost to all human thought and action.
Lawyers and legislators are certainly welcome to attempt to redefine the laws of physics, but they'd be more gainfully occupied sitting on the beach telling the tide to remain still.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a PET (actually a CBM 8008) - and yeah, the PET design resembled an original iMac in that it was a single sealed case: VDU, cassette recorder, keyboard. So not very tinkerable at all.
What was amazing was just how the PET *was* hacked regardless - like the infamous 'CB2 sound', where the second (unused) cassette recorder tone generator was used with some circuitry to make music.
Good times, good times...
And if you didn't realize it farming is destined for space.
How, exactly? Can you grow plants on bare rock and vacuum?
Because if you can, there's plenty of land in Australia and the Sahara - with bonus extra oxygen and water - on which you could use those same techniques, for far cheaper.
an overpriced, locked down piece of crap that no one will ever buy
Two out of three ain't bad.
I like this game, let's try another one:
Social problem: Corrupt government
Technological solution: ?
Result: ?
Batman!
Technological solution: Irrigation
Result: Over-irrigation, salinity rise, catastrophic ecosystem failure
Social problem: Famine
http://www.ejfoundation.org/page146.html
Solving social problems with technology is what generates new social problems.
I wish people could get it thru their head that we are not launching stacks of 100 dollar bills into space. Every last red cent is spent here on earth.
That's true, but meaningless - because *all* money spent on *anything*, good or bad, is spent 'right here on Earth', by definition. That includes the $1 Trillion baseline spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, and the $8+ Trillion spent on the bank bailout.
If I airdropped a billion dollars of $10 bills over a major US city, that would also be spent right here on Earth.
And yes the funds for space were spent paying very smart people to do very clever things involving rocket engines. But being smart and being a smart use of resources aren't the same thing.
I could pay a billion dollars to a guy to build a model of the Empire State Building out of toothpicks, and that would be a very challenging and inspiring task. And it would have spinoff effects for the local economy, for toothpick salesmen, for the media.
But is that a billion dollars that could have been spent *better*? And do we need so many very clever toothpick engineers?
What's the *actual*, direct result of space investment, not the spinoffs?
It is a good thing that our ancestors weren't so pessimistic about exploration. Bonus points to whomever realized that colonizing space doesn't involve enslaving the natives.
Slavery and tobacco are what built the New World colony fleets... that, and local breathable oxygen, water, gravity, no radiation, and a whole DNA-compatible biosphere.
Got any of those in space? Europa, maybe? Better not get too close to Jupiter's radiation belt, though.
And, of course - should we ever succeed in building a stable space biosphere module, we could always replicate that same module for far cheaper on Earth, with all the same benefits of the 'omg saving humanity by dispersing it' argument.
It's just that most people don't WANT to live in hermetically sealed metal boxes or fallout shelters. But a fallout shelter after the worst nuclear apocalypse would be a lot more livable environment than a standalone space colony on Mars.
Or contracts to "Not send asteroids on collision course with Earth" in exchange for whatever the "Coalition of Independent Space Colonies" want.
Which contract will soon be followed by Her Majesty's Royal Space Marines blowing the living daylights out of the Independent Space Colonies, replacing them with automated nuke silos, and retreating back down-well to where there's oxygen.
Or more likely, just cutting their weekly food-for-poo Progress ships, turning off their Internet feed and denying them any more update patches for their nuclear reactor control computer, and leaving them to starve/meltdown.
Living in space doesn't magically give you unlimited energy, superintelligence and a stable biosphere, regardless of what Heinlein may have thought. Our current 'space colonies' are totally dependent on lifesupport from Earth. It will be a while before we get to even 'can live a year without supplies' let alone 'can blow up Earth and not notice'.
"even vat grown organs airdropped to wherever you need them"
If you can vat-grow organs in the first place, whyever would you choose to grow them in *space* where the gravity field is wonky and muscles and bones atrophy? Cheaper and healthier all round to just deploy that same technology on Earth.
Space is not a place where things are magically better. It's a place where things are harder, deadlier, worse, more expensive, break more, and you have to bring even your oxygen with you.
The only thing space has more of is sunlight, vacuum, and microgravity. Which are worth... what, exactly?
"little more than a few trillion tons of metal, ceramics, volatiles and a few million tons of precious metals"
Sure... but can you mine them in clunky vacuum suits or robots and return them to Earth on single-use chemical rockets for cheaper than just mining them on Earth? And will there be an endless demand for exotic metal ores on an Earth struggling with biosphere depletion and lack of fresh water, food and oxygen?
Our ideas of value are all relative. Gold seems like it's a valuable commodity on the market now because it's rare, but it's not actually that *valuable* compared to H2O, if you know what I mean. You might have better luck mining comets for water.
And rockets are expensive. OTOH, you could de-orbit a few trillion tons of metal ore or ice quite cheaply if you didn't mind leaving a large crater and a planetwide extinction event...
If you build a cheap gravity drive then yes, you could cut the cost of mining space. But if you could do that you could also do a whole lot of other things than go into space.
Actually.... there have been people rather like Batman in the 1930s era. Private millionaires who bankrolled much of WW2 military R&D.
Look up Howard Hughes, Alfred Loomis, Floyd Odlum, William Stephenson, 'Wild Bill' Donovan. Those boys got up to interesting stuff, sometimes working for 'the government' and sometimes on their own time (and dime). They weren't all friends of Hoover and FDR.
And to be honest, that heritage still exists today. Some of the same types of characters surfaced in teams Nixon, Reagan and Bush. Private military contractors, private defense contractors. Wackenhut/Group4, Blackwater/XE, KBR, Halliburton...
Batman is alive and well.
However, we have managed to clone things that old in the past! The record is a bacterium from 250 mya. Pretty impressive.
In other news, the mysterious illness causing all staff of a local genetic research lab to be quarantined continues to spread. Authorities say there is no cause for alarm, but requested that all citizens stock up on shotgun ammo and 10,000 volt electric fences "to celebrate the end of the recession". When asked for a comment, an InGen executive raised his crest feathers, bared his dorsal spine, and told this reporter, "Raaaaaarrrrgggh!"
InGen stock rose 40 points on this news.
Why isn't the abundance of Helium-3 more of a selling point for the return to the moon?
Because Helium-3 is useless unless we already have controlled fusion.
Which is still 50 years away, as it has been for the last 50 years.
Except that by the time our sun goes out, so will quite a few others...
So what exactly would you have several hundred thousand scientists, engineers, manufacturers, technicians all skilled in space flight technology DO?
Make nuclear missiles! That's something that can be used right here on Earth!
"Nobody gets run over by an infected computer. "
No. But having your bank account phished and all your life savings stolen might be almost as bad.
"Wouldn't the vast sum of money required be better spent preserving the rainforests here on earth?"
It probably would, but preserving the rainforests is a tough problem involving political and business corruption, where it's not at all clear what to spend money on - giving money to any organisation involved in the Amazon is as likely as not to make matters worse, since they're probably already turning a blind eye to logging.
John Derbyshire wrote an insightful article detailing a number of reasons why. I think he's hit it on the head.
That would be the article where he says this?
It starts you down the path to true wisdom—the "fixed incredulity" that Mrs. Thrale remarked on in the character of Dr. Johnson. (It took Johnson's friends six months to persuade him that reports of the great Lisbon earthquake were true. He was, said one of them, "the last man on earth to whom one should bring a wonder.")
Why does he think such hard-core skepticism as represented in Dr Johnson's six-month lag in accepting the reality of a simple earthquake is "the path to true wisdom"?
Doesn't give me much confidence in his views on science.
Further to this, the biggest problem I have with GUIs is what I would describe as a 'lack of reification'.
Everything we do on a computer is a command. CLIs store these as text lines in scripts. GUIs have 'events' which are commands. But by design, they do not expose these events to the user. IMO, this is a mistake.
A truly humane GUI would record all the commands initiated by the user and save them as interactable objects of some kind. Perhaps like Facebook's 'events' list, you would be able to see the last things you did, and point at them and say 'undo this' or 'save this as a script'.
Reification - being able to turn verbs into nouns - is a fundamental feature of human language. Our interaction with computers, whether textual or graphical, does take the form of speech. We're deliberately crippling our language in GUIs by having invisible 'verbs' which cannot be interacted with.
Drag and drop was always a bad UI idea, IMO. You have an action which forces you to move a mouse a fair distance, then drop it onto a small target, while holding the button depressed. This causes lots of muscle strain. Worse, if you twitch and hit the wrong target, you may now have initiated an action (such as move a file) onto the wrong target with not only unintended consequences, but consequences which you don't know what they are and the system does not tell you.
How many times has a non-technical user 'lost' a file by accidentally finger-twitching and dropping it into the wrong folder? On the command line, you could rm -rf, but if you did at least you had a visual record of EXACTLY what went wrong.
Not in the GUI world, not in drag-and-drop. This is a bug, not a feature.
Yes, definitely. For example, a weird UI thing: why, by default, can you not tab over the buttons of a dialog? Why are there no accelerator keys for menus? This seems to be deliberately making a product unfriendly to people who use the keyboard. The IBM CUA guidelines, on which Windows was based, have been out since the late 1980s - yet OSX users seem to think that using the mouse constantly is a feature, or at least a requirement, of a modern GUI.
"Artists use macs because the design of the UI is the nicest thing out there. "
The LOOK of the UI is nice, yes.
The actual DESIGN of it - how it operates - not nearly so much. Seriously, the Dock? Where you can't tell without squinting whether a program is running or not?
Please stop using the word "design" to mean "superficial visual appearance" rather than "function".
"the thinkpads have boring design."
What confuses and frustrates me is: when did the word "design" change from meaning "the stuff that makes a machine actually work right and be suitable for task" to "the replaceable plastic bling on the outside of a box which makes it look pretty"?
Used to be, a "designer" was someone who knew how things worked and planned how to build things... now for some reason it means the person who picks out the paint after the engineers have finished their job.
"And that argument would fail because it's fundamentally incorrect."
Incorrect by what definition? The arbitrary whims of law, or by the actual physical reality of what information versus matter is?
Society can pass whatever laws they want, but law can't make something which is physically INCORRECT 'correct'.
Information can be copied without losing value - in fact it gains value in the process. Matter can not.
Property is the ownership - spatial localisation and control - of matter.
Information cannot be 'property' because the laws of physics say it just ain't so.
Information can only be controlled (and bought and sold and rented) LIKE property if we willingly engage in a massive society-wide fiction such that everyone with an ear and a mouth (or a computer) willingly or unwillingly restrict their natural rights to listen and speak. This apparatus of control imposes a huge cost to all human thought and action.
Lawyers and legislators are certainly welcome to attempt to redefine the laws of physics, but they'd be more gainfully occupied sitting on the beach telling the tide to remain still.