They continually say that some kinds of matter are too complex for the holodeck or replicators to produce
And yet they can replicate food, which is extremely complex and where you really don't want any transcription errors creating, eg, CH3OH instead of C2H6O.
I'm sorry, I was attempting to apply rational thought to Star Trek. My mistake.
The people who would conceal the risks and continually lower the safety standards are the societal outcasts.
If only they were. I think the words you're looking for are "the rich, powerful and corrupt societal elite, who in a sane and well-ordered world would instead be societal outcasts."
And ten years from now, the browser will be exactly the same as it is now. That's what you want, isn't it?
YES.
The browser is now a platform. You build stuff on platforms. You don't change the platform itself once you've got it built. If you do, all the layers above it break, and everyone using those layers to do actual work have to stop while they're rebuilt. Why would you inflict that kind of damage on yourself, over and over again?
If web browsers were to keep all the chrome of a regular application, you end up with a pretty cluttered display: a full blown application (the web app) within a full blown application (the web browser).
And that chrome would mean you would then be able to tell the difference between a fradulent phishing window from haxxors.r.us.ru and your account payment window from bigbank.com. But you'd rather do away with that and create a fiction where everything is just "an app" which you trust equally well because...?
I don't want that. I want the Web to look different from the desktop because it is different, and I want Web application from different sites to be distinguishable from each other, using window decorations outside the control of the application that the website can't fake its identification.
Cheap, abundant, easily accessible energy means fewer people crying out for government to do something about energy, something that everyone uses and everyone needs.
You mean like wind and solar?
Most environmental arguments I've seen against nuclear power and for renewables make the same point: that renewable energy sources - compared to big expensive and dangerous fission or fusion plants, or even slightly less expensive and dangerous oil and gas plants - are cheap and safe to implement, which means they can be distributed widely around the nation and world, which means big government and big business get out of the energy game, the grid is more resilient, people are more self-reliant and less dependent on the system.
In other worlds, exactly the opposite of what you're claiming. Interesting, that.
I don't understand why most comments seem negative to the idea of mass robotic. This is great - more efficient production = lower prices.
No, automation doesn't automatically mean lower prices. It means lower marginal costs of production for the producer, which could just as well mean higher shareholder returns than lower prices to the end-user.
We've seen first-hand in the copyright war that mass deployment of automation in the copying field does not mean near-free information - which is what an unregulated market would produce - but a legal response by IP holders to keep the prices of the finished goods artificially high by making unlicenced automation illegal.
Since a precedent has been set, why would you think that automation elsewhere in the production chain would be treated any differently? If massive cost savings result from automating any process, and that process could be cheaply replicated everywhere, then that process will be patented, licenced, and locked down to prevent the nightmare scenario of anyone except a small elite cadre of factory owners being able to make stuff.
Our economic system isn't primarily designed to produce stuff. It's designed to produce debt: creating it as interest-bearing loans, distributing these as widely as possible, then concentrating them into smaller and smaller hands. Businesses are set up to harvest this debt by attracting bank loans or venture capital, selling cheaply made products expensively to consumers on credit, and then returning the surplus to investors. Any production of actual goods and services is a byproduct of the money shuffle, not the main intention. That this is the case is obvious when you see that the people making the most money in our economy are those who sell financial services: they're skipping the irrelevant distraction of making stuff and just selling pure debt directly.
Except this won't be able to continue forever. Once the global debt bubble implodes for good, we'll need to work out how to change our business model from selling debt to getting stuff done, and that's going to hurt. The Communists tried it and it didn't work. Global capitalism isn't working either. Whatever third option is left... I hope we find it soon.
Nah, you just need a stock standard R2-series astromech droid, have it insert its computer access probe into the nearest rotary dial socket, then tell it "Unlock all trash compactors on the detention level".
Or load the secret battle station plans into it and tell it to launch a lifepod. Nobody will ever shoot it because, hey, it's just a droid, and droids never smuggle data.
Or you send your droid into the druglord's hideout, and instead of doing a mandatory security wipe or even checking for hidden compartments, the first thing they do is let the fully powered up and droid serve drinks to all the high-level operatives. Then just wait while it tosses you a deadly weapon, and uses its own taser attachment to fry anyone in reach.
It always works because nobody has ever tried to do bad things with droids ever in the history of the universe. *
* Except for that whole galactic war in which one side's armies was composed entirely of assassin battle robots. But other than that, robots are totally cool and you should let them just walk into the highest security environments!
Have you used Linux any time in the last, say, 3 years?
Three years ago would probably be perfect. As long as the AC hasn't used it in the last two years, when Canonical started getting serious about destroying the user interface, the illusion that Linux is still a viable desktop OS would be unbroken.
I have no doubt that Hollywood will lose its taste for the cash cow it's currently grinding into hamburger
So you're saying that someone will get their Mother Goose, which though now cooked, formerly laid the golden eggs, but ultimately it will be good for the gander?
Take Star Wars for example. It is the same as the tale of King Author
I must have missed the part where Obi-Wan marries Leia, Luke sleeps with her, and then Obi-Wan's evil sister attacks his kingdom. I did nod off for most of The Phantom Menace, was it somewhere in there?
Oh wait, you said "King Author". Yes, I think I remember that one. Young apprentice storyteller spins a wonderful tale which captivates a kingdom and earns him the crown. Then over time he turns into a tyrant until finally one day he meets his nemesis, Sir Editor...
Creative people are happy to create, nobody is eschewing hollywood for wall street.
I dunno, I thought "Debt Ceiling Armageddon: Judgement Day: Rise of the Republicans" had a pretty good cliff-hanger and lots of scenery chewing in it. Too many shots of people hunched behind broking terminals though.
Then why the hell isn't Tony Stark eighty years old now?
Drugs. H.A.T.E., er, S.H.I.E.L.D., has the best drugs. So he can continue fighting terrorists for the rest of his horrible drug-extended life. In New Jersey. For H.A.T.E.!
(The Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort is a wholly funded subsidiary of the Beyond Corporation, purveyors of the finest broccoli-based artificial henchman substitutes.)
To reach further, we need to get a permanent presence on the LEO. Once we have, once we can reach it cheaply and reliably, reaching other planets - including the Moon - is relatively simple.
Simple in terms of brute energy cost, yes. Not necessarily in terms of mission time, consumables, life support, radiation, and all the other tricky things which make manned space travel so awkward and hazardous. It's not much use to send a human crew on a six-year Hohmann trajectory to Saturn if they starve en route. To keep people alive, we would need to invest deeply in either cryogenic hibernation or self-sustaining closed biospheres, neither of which have worked out at all well so far (though biospheres seem at least possible, if just very difficult).
Meanwhile, there's nothing particularly interesting or saleable that we can ship back from Saturn, and we can already toss robot probes to the far end of the solar system by doing direct launch from Earth, so why exactly do we need to send people out again?
I am in favour of developing closed biospheres, since not only do they seem like the key to space (should we ever find anything out there worth exploring), but they would be useful right here on Earth, and the ecological knowledge gained could be transferred to help protect and even reverse the damage we've so far done to Biosphere 1. But we don't need a moonbase or even rockets to get started on biospheres. We could get on that right away if we actually cared.
That would mean recruiting and working with hippies, though, so... any takers?
Comparing Healthcare... which i supposed to YIELD health, or social security which is supposed to YIELD social security with a space program that is supposed to.... yield what exactly???
Space, obviously.
You think geometry just grows on trees? You might think we have it tough with peak oil and the debt ceiling, but just imagine what happens when we get "peak space" in about a decade. We'll have all this stuff... like, iPod 5s, Guitar Hero controllers, used Pokemon cartridges, flared jeans... and nowhere to put it.
Worst case, the world could experience a dimensional singularity where we all get squeezed into a plane, or even a line. That's what happens if we don't have a space program.
how much a security gate is worth when armed poor rise up.
Don't guns cost money? How do the poor rise up if they can't afford the ammo?
Not that I think violence solves anything, it actually just turns a bad situation into a worse one (see the current crisis in Somalia for an extended example). But why is there this mythology that expensive weapons technology, even if not actively proscribed by the government, would somehow be affordable by the very people who don't have money to buy cheap things, like food and housing? And then be able to outthink and outgun the people who can afford to hire the best hired militias?
I mean unless you've somehow flooded the domestic market with cheap firearms, given your poor free weapons training via the military, removed their compassion by shipping them off to full-on urban conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan where they learn to kill civilians, let them torture prisoners in black sites, make them angry by not paying invalid benefits and using stop-loss orders to prevent them leaving when their initial tour is over... then bring them back home and hire them as security guards in your upscale malls where they spend all day guarding iPods made in China that they can't afford.
But that would be stupid, so unless you do that, you'll be just fine... right?
This is not negotiation, this is taking America hostage.
You have to admit, it is a plan worthy of a Bond villain.
"Ve vant TWO TREEEEELION DOLLARS in tax reductions or ve vill crash ze American economy! And zis time ve do not even need to drill into Vort Knox and made all ze gold radioactive! Zat bit ve do just vor ze lulz! Muhahaha!"
Slashdot Mirror
They continually say that some kinds of matter are too complex for the holodeck or replicators to produce
And yet they can replicate food, which is extremely complex and where you really don't want any transcription errors creating, eg, CH3OH instead of C2H6O.
I'm sorry, I was attempting to apply rational thought to Star Trek. My mistake.
The people who would conceal the risks and continually lower the safety standards are the societal outcasts.
If only they were. I think the words you're looking for are "the rich, powerful and corrupt societal elite, who in a sane and well-ordered world would instead be societal outcasts."
Or Val-"Portal 2 was overrated and Episode 3 is the new Duke Nukem Forever, only DNF actually shipped"-ve?
I remember when Microsoft used to be cool.
WAIT 6502,1
Those were the days.
And ten years from now, the browser will be exactly the same as it is now. That's what you want, isn't it?
YES.
The browser is now a platform. You build stuff on platforms. You don't change the platform itself once you've got it built. If you do, all the layers above it break, and everyone using those layers to do actual work have to stop while they're rebuilt. Why would you inflict that kind of damage on yourself, over and over again?
If web browsers were to keep all the chrome of a regular application, you end up with a pretty cluttered display: a full blown application (the web app) within a full blown application (the web browser).
And that chrome would mean you would then be able to tell the difference between a fradulent phishing window from haxxors.r.us.ru and your account payment window from bigbank.com. But you'd rather do away with that and create a fiction where everything is just "an app" which you trust equally well because...?
I don't want that. I want the Web to look different from the desktop because it is different, and I want Web application from different sites to be distinguishable from each other, using window decorations outside the control of the application that the website can't fake its identification.
This is basic Desktop UI Security 101 - right?
Cheap, abundant, easily accessible energy means fewer people crying out for government to do something about energy, something that everyone uses and everyone needs.
You mean like wind and solar?
Most environmental arguments I've seen against nuclear power and for renewables make the same point: that renewable energy sources - compared to big expensive and dangerous fission or fusion plants, or even slightly less expensive and dangerous oil and gas plants - are cheap and safe to implement, which means they can be distributed widely around the nation and world, which means big government and big business get out of the energy game, the grid is more resilient, people are more self-reliant and less dependent on the system.
In other worlds, exactly the opposite of what you're claiming. Interesting, that.
I don't understand why most comments seem negative to the idea of mass robotic. This is great - more efficient production = lower prices.
No, automation doesn't automatically mean lower prices. It means lower marginal costs of production for the producer, which could just as well mean higher shareholder returns than lower prices to the end-user.
We've seen first-hand in the copyright war that mass deployment of automation in the copying field does not mean near-free information - which is what an unregulated market would produce - but a legal response by IP holders to keep the prices of the finished goods artificially high by making unlicenced automation illegal.
Since a precedent has been set, why would you think that automation elsewhere in the production chain would be treated any differently? If massive cost savings result from automating any process, and that process could be cheaply replicated everywhere, then that process will be patented, licenced, and locked down to prevent the nightmare scenario of anyone except a small elite cadre of factory owners being able to make stuff.
Our economic system isn't primarily designed to produce stuff. It's designed to produce debt: creating it as interest-bearing loans, distributing these as widely as possible, then concentrating them into smaller and smaller hands. Businesses are set up to harvest this debt by attracting bank loans or venture capital, selling cheaply made products expensively to consumers on credit, and then returning the surplus to investors. Any production of actual goods and services is a byproduct of the money shuffle, not the main intention. That this is the case is obvious when you see that the people making the most money in our economy are those who sell financial services: they're skipping the irrelevant distraction of making stuff and just selling pure debt directly.
Except this won't be able to continue forever. Once the global debt bubble implodes for good, we'll need to work out how to change our business model from selling debt to getting stuff done, and that's going to hurt. The Communists tried it and it didn't work. Global capitalism isn't working either. Whatever third option is left... I hope we find it soon.
Nah, you just need a stock standard R2-series astromech droid, have it insert its computer access probe into the nearest rotary dial socket, then tell it "Unlock all trash compactors on the detention level".
Or load the secret battle station plans into it and tell it to launch a lifepod. Nobody will ever shoot it because, hey, it's just a droid, and droids never smuggle data.
Or you send your droid into the druglord's hideout, and instead of doing a mandatory security wipe or even checking for hidden compartments, the first thing they do is let the fully powered up and droid serve drinks to all the high-level operatives. Then just wait while it tosses you a deadly weapon, and uses its own taser attachment to fry anyone in reach.
It always works because nobody has ever tried to do bad things with droids ever in the history of the universe. *
* Except for that whole galactic war in which one side's armies was composed entirely of assassin battle robots. But other than that, robots are totally cool and you should let them just walk into the highest security environments!
They break up the different versions of IE, if you combine all the IE versions then the IQ levels exceed the others.
By your browsers combined... I am Captain Blue-E-Planet-Logo!
Have you used Linux any time in the last, say, 3 years?
Three years ago would probably be perfect. As long as the AC hasn't used it in the last two years, when Canonical started getting serious about destroying the user interface, the illusion that Linux is still a viable desktop OS would be unbroken.
Maybe we'll finally get the long promised Ender's Game. Here's hoping...
Nah, Ender's Game would work much better as a MMORPG where you play a soldier teleoperating remote drones shooting up wedding parties in Afghanistan.
When you hit the level cap, you get a fax from the CIA and a gun with one bullet in the chamber.
Hostess Cupcakes: The Movie
It'll be bigger than Avengers. You know I'm right.
The movies can't seem to get past origin stories, and their direct aftermath.
Why not do a Starwars?
Um, the original Star Wars was Luke's origin story. The studios have learned their lesson well.
I have no doubt that Hollywood will lose its taste for the cash cow it's currently grinding into hamburger
So you're saying that someone will get their Mother Goose, which though now cooked, formerly laid the golden eggs, but ultimately it will be good for the gander?
English types have broken down pretty much every possible plot into 7 different categories of conflict:
Alternatively, you could further reduce all these seven plots to:
Something Vs Something Else
Hey look! I just proved that every plot everywhere is absolutely identical!
Possibly there is more to a plot than just "there is some kind of conflict"?
Take Star Wars for example. It is the same as the tale of King Author
I must have missed the part where Obi-Wan marries Leia, Luke sleeps with her, and then Obi-Wan's evil sister attacks his kingdom. I did nod off for most of The Phantom Menace, was it somewhere in there?
Oh wait, you said "King Author". Yes, I think I remember that one. Young apprentice storyteller spins a wonderful tale which captivates a kingdom and earns him the crown. Then over time he turns into a tyrant until finally one day he meets his nemesis, Sir Editor...
Creative people are happy to create, nobody is eschewing hollywood for wall street.
I dunno, I thought "Debt Ceiling Armageddon: Judgement Day: Rise of the Republicans" had a pretty good cliff-hanger and lots of scenery chewing in it. Too many shots of people hunched behind broking terminals though.
What you've forgotten is that equally much was not so created.
O rly?
Shakespeare was performed for money. The Mona Lisa was a portrait for hire.
Just because it's seen as "high art" in a noncommercial ghetto now doesn't mean that it started out that way.
Then why the hell isn't Tony Stark eighty years old now?
Drugs. H.A.T.E., er, S.H.I.E.L.D., has the best drugs. So he can continue fighting terrorists for the rest of his horrible drug-extended life. In New Jersey. For H.A.T.E.!
(The Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort is a wholly funded subsidiary of the Beyond Corporation, purveyors of the finest broccoli-based artificial henchman substitutes.)
To reach further, we need to get a permanent presence on the LEO. Once we have, once we can reach it cheaply and reliably, reaching other planets - including the Moon - is relatively simple.
Simple in terms of brute energy cost, yes. Not necessarily in terms of mission time, consumables, life support, radiation, and all the other tricky things which make manned space travel so awkward and hazardous. It's not much use to send a human crew on a six-year Hohmann trajectory to Saturn if they starve en route. To keep people alive, we would need to invest deeply in either cryogenic hibernation or self-sustaining closed biospheres, neither of which have worked out at all well so far (though biospheres seem at least possible, if just very difficult).
Meanwhile, there's nothing particularly interesting or saleable that we can ship back from Saturn, and we can already toss robot probes to the far end of the solar system by doing direct launch from Earth, so why exactly do we need to send people out again?
I am in favour of developing closed biospheres, since not only do they seem like the key to space (should we ever find anything out there worth exploring), but they would be useful right here on Earth, and the ecological knowledge gained could be transferred to help protect and even reverse the damage we've so far done to Biosphere 1. But we don't need a moonbase or even rockets to get started on biospheres. We could get on that right away if we actually cared.
That would mean recruiting and working with hippies, though, so... any takers?
Comparing Healthcare ... which i supposed to YIELD health, or social security which is supposed to YIELD social security with a space program that is supposed to .... yield what exactly???
Space, obviously.
You think geometry just grows on trees? You might think we have it tough with peak oil and the debt ceiling, but just imagine what happens when we get "peak space" in about a decade. We'll have all this stuff... like, iPod 5s, Guitar Hero controllers, used Pokemon cartridges, flared jeans... and nowhere to put it.
Worst case, the world could experience a dimensional singularity where we all get squeezed into a plane, or even a line. That's what happens if we don't have a space program.
You're a fucking idiot right? The US spend more on healthcare because we have more people get sick.
Yes, why is that? You're an advanced country, you know how to prevent disease as well as treat it... so why do you have more people getting sick?
how much a security gate is worth when armed poor rise up.
Don't guns cost money? How do the poor rise up if they can't afford the ammo?
Not that I think violence solves anything, it actually just turns a bad situation into a worse one (see the current crisis in Somalia for an extended example). But why is there this mythology that expensive weapons technology, even if not actively proscribed by the government, would somehow be affordable by the very people who don't have money to buy cheap things, like food and housing? And then be able to outthink and outgun the people who can afford to hire the best hired militias?
I mean unless you've somehow flooded the domestic market with cheap firearms, given your poor free weapons training via the military, removed their compassion by shipping them off to full-on urban conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan where they learn to kill civilians, let them torture prisoners in black sites, make them angry by not paying invalid benefits and using stop-loss orders to prevent them leaving when their initial tour is over... then bring them back home and hire them as security guards in your upscale malls where they spend all day guarding iPods made in China that they can't afford.
But that would be stupid, so unless you do that, you'll be just fine... right?
This is not negotiation, this is taking America hostage.
You have to admit, it is a plan worthy of a Bond villain.
"Ve vant TWO TREEEEELION DOLLARS in tax reductions or ve vill crash ze American economy! And zis time ve do not even need to drill into Vort Knox and made all ze gold radioactive! Zat bit ve do just vor ze lulz! Muhahaha!"