The Asian Invasion continues...with Robot Sumo!...coming to a tube near you this fall, and hosted by Ota Shinichiro of Iron Chef fame (minus his energetic english translator--he is afraid of robots)!
;-)
Re:The classic catch was not addressed
on
Hotel on the Moon
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· Score: 1
The two previous/. stories on space elevators (here & here) simply point to the fact that materials science is the only thing that has to "catch up" to kill off chemical-based rockets as the best solution.
With these (diamondoid) materials, building a long mag-driven runway a few miles up would actually be safer than a full-scale skyhook, since this platform wouldn't crash-wrap around the planet if it failed at the wrong place.:-)
Saying that 'nanotechnology' 'can't rebuild' something (especially if it worked fine to begin with), is as much of an oxymoron as saying you're a smart retard.
"Microsoft... Hmm, they're heavily weighted in my [insert stock market instrument]... I better do whatever it takes to give my financial security the upperhand, no matter how small the effect my greed-bias will actually have."
Have I read too much Ringworld? No. Too much nonfiction, Yes.
Living on planetary surfaces is actually more costly than building space habitats--using current, not "thousand years" off, technology. And, yes, instead of living on Mars, we could (and probably WILL eventually) rip it apart and spread the material out more efficiently, creating a vastly greater surface area to live in comfortably. Leaving Mars, and the other planets alone, there's still enough asteroidal material to support a *million Earth populations (*I forget the 'exact' estimate, and am too lazy to look it up right now).
Asimov would have called you a "Planetary Chauvinist" for focusing so narrowly on colonizing the Moon and Mars. Havn't we learned yet that living at the bottom of gravity well is not a smart choice?
There's no future in living on the limited surface area of a select few habitable planets. However, there *is* a future in building our own habitats in freespace; and they'll be able to support populations millions of times larger than any Earth or Mars could.
It should be noted (since it's often slighted) that the greenhouse effect is not the only earth-cooking factor to consider going forward. Of equal importance is how much heat is being pumped into the biosphere from our increasing power usage. So, at the same time we're trapping more incoming sunlight, we're outputting more of our own waste heat too.
Using the "optimistic" low growth rate population projected by the United Nations, by the year 2060 there will be some 13 billion people. If at that time the present great disparities in the wealth of nations have been reduced, so that all are using energy at about the same per capita rate, that maximum tolerable rate turns our to be greater than our own by an amount that is only 3 percent per year of per capita growth. The "heat limit" is therefore a real one. It may be that it could be pushed back, for a while, by covering large areas of Earth with mirrors to reduce the total absorbed solar energy. But it cannot be delayed for long -- another fifty five years and we would be putting into the biosphere ten percnt as much heat as is received by the Sun. A continual growth of energy usage on the surface of Earth, therefore, even if the growth rate is moderate, is one of the "absurdities" of which Schumacher has written.
Wealth is highly correlated to energy consumption, and the third world won't be a third world for much longer. So, even without the greenhouse effect, we'll soon be cooking ourselves anyway!........(unless we move our eggs out of the cradle, which is the point of the rest of this "old" book that I pulled the quote from...)
"...America's most profitable business is still the manufacture, packaging, distribution, and marketing of bullshit. high-quality, grade-A, prime-cut, pure American bullshit."
...
"...stunningly and embarrassingly full of shit"
...
"If honesty were suddenly introduced into American life, the whole system would collapse!"
The best defense is a brain -- there's not much we can do for the blissfully ignorant sheeple.:-)
The `need' to charge for digital content is really nothing more than a reactionary stopgap--to tide us over until the other side of "the equation*" is solved in a few decades. (*democratized molecular manufacturing)
Question: Why do people even try to charge for information in the first place?
Simple Answer: In order to pay for scarce resources (like food) in the physical world.
Question: What happens when humankind is eventually able to manipulate atoms like bits, reducing the "cost of living" to the cost of computing?
Answer: The equation is now balanced; the physical realm can also be open sourced (as in free beer and free speech (but not free enough to enable a `grey goo' scenario))
This is of course, IMHO, as I really haven't encountered a good treatise on the economics of abundance, and I still worry about an old-economy carryover that keeps a traditional, power-hungy, man-ape pecking order intact--so that a few might rule.
If we are to seriously get into space, we need something better than current chemical rocket technology.
The BEST idea I've yet heard is to build -- once we can manufacture stronger materials like diamondoid -- a miles-high, miles-long launch platform, running parallel to the equator.
The reusable ship(s) and payload would take a ~30-minute elevator ride up to the top of the platform, where atmospheric drag is almost zero, and would then be magnetically accelerated into orbit. It looks to be a very clean and efficient solution, once we can build it; even better than the more romantic skyhook.
Anyone have a link to more info on this? I can't seem to find it.
Where did I say that money would completely dissapear in my "utopian" post? I didn't. I simply suggested that old economics of scarce resources and unlimited desire will change to one of almost unlimited resources to match unlimited desire.
As for realestate.....well, I plan on moving offworld, inside the first O'Neil Cylinder. There, I can design my own waterfront property (or dissapear into a fantasy reality of utility fog just as real).:-)
If not for the inclusion of 'cluetrain' in your reply, I might have dismissed your post as just another ad exec type rationalizing and apologizing for his job.;-)
However, the cluetrain signatories still represent a minority slice of humanized companies willing to treat people like something other than categorized cattle with credit cards. The majority will continue to spy and track down us cashcows in their black helicopters -- dissecting us, seeking maximum exploitation potential.
And so, I will continue to despise, and block out, the majority of the evil-because-evil-works marketers of the world.
I'm probably a little atypical, but I just can't stand the idea of allowing myself to be mentally engineered by marketing weasels who know too much about me.
Ideally, there should be a truly anonymous way of indicating personal preferences in order to make ads relevant......but that will never happen because it's not as profitable as some snake being able to ferret out the knowledge that the cow sitting behind IP 1.2.3.4 with cookie ABCD911 visted Do-I-Have-The-Clap.com, and then informs all affiliates to increase the exposure of venereal disease ads. At least in the real world you could drive across town (or state lines) to fix a drippy dick (without having to see VD billboards), and no one would be the wiser. Zeroknowledge.
You know, I really wonder what the public will think of nanotech once its huge implications hit the mainstream head-on -- in the same way that the public now "understands" Artificial Intelligence thanks to the movies. Dateline to the rescue! *grin*
Will Foresight succeed in educating people, or will the public inflate nanotech companies with their hopes and dreams, in the same way as biotech/internet companies, expecting another [stock appreciation] revolution in a "new-new economy?" Of course, we'll get the revolution [of abundance], but I wonder how long it will take people to figure out that there will be even more FuckedCompany's when it finally sinks in what it means to be able to manipulate matter with the same ease as bits of data.
...and we all know how easy it's been to convince the public that artificial digital scarcity is a good thing, right? But, without real material scarcity, there's no motivation to try and rationalize the sale of intangibles in order to pay for once scarce tangibles.
Give me some molecules, some sunlight, a molecular blueprint, the magic nano bootstrap process, and I'm in business!.........unless someone claims a monopoly on atoms or sunlight that is.:)
What if I mute my radio when Howard Stern re-runs his "personal" product endorsements?
What if I write in the margins of my textbook?
What if I cover the ads in the newspaper with my hands or a black marker?
What if I skip the commercials when watching a recorded TV show/movie?
...What if remove the ads from a webpage?
You're not a very good devil's advocate if you can't see that the end-user has the right to alter whatever he wants in his content, for his own fair-use.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is a third party, and should not alter someone elses content for you BY DEFAULT, but they still could and should enable people to do it themselves if they want.
No, ads don't pay for content (directly); mindless people are manipulated by ads into paying for content (indirectly). Thus, having the mind in the first place to opt-out harms no one.
I've hated advertising for as long as I can remember; it didn't take the subversion of the net for me to realize how evil paid-for deception is.
Some people actually like to think of marketing as providing a valuable service in notifying them of exciting new products and services!......and it usually turns out that I don't like those types of people either, for other reasons related to that mindset.
All advertising also requires that it pass along its cost, adding a premium to whatever is being sold (often in spite of the economies of scale) -- it's a lazy tax worth avoiding for both the dollar AND mental savings.
What I'm wondering is what happens in the unlikely event that a significant minority of pissed-off 'consumers' decide to opt-out of being brainwashed by advertisers?
Will the "mental engineers" honor the wishes of these consumers to be left in peace? Or will they take drastic measures to recapture their audience by technical countermeasures?
I'm still awaiting the first brain-dead website to require some kind of IE-only plugin that, for instance, "shuts off content" if it can't verify the presence of banner pixels onscreen. There's probably better ways to force eyeball burn-in (getting image of Gelfling's strapped to a chair in the Dark Crystal)... but I'm not going to waste much thought on it.
Personally, I block all ads, cookies, popups, etc., except from those sites I trust, and I don't feel I'm "taking advantage" of a free service simply because I choose to think for myself instead of being subjected to annoying influence (aka: advertising). Oh, and when Retinal Scanning Displays finally hit the market, I plan on filtering out real-world ads too (a roadside Coca-cola billboard might be overlayed with a something that says, "Sugar water is not a lifestyle!"):-)
This means for us to use solar power effectively would require a massively new way to store power efficently overnight. People have proposed all kinds of things.....
.....with the best proposal being the one(s) where we don't have to worry so much about nighttime power storage (or power scarcity in general) when you instead have dozens of geosync'd solar power satellites safely microwaving their inexhaustible power back down to the surface.
There's no avoiding this eventual best cost/benefit solution; ground based solar conversion is almost as much of a joke as continued use of fossil-fuel is.
If everyone's upload speed (except a few college/corporate/govt 'rogues') ended up getting severely restricted by most major ISPs -- ostensibly because users only need to SUCK, not serve information (but really to keep the copyright infringing floodgates shut tight) -- what could we do then?
Except for maybe swarmcasting lots of redundant data (while at the same time not violating the terms by being a member of "the hive"), we'd effectively be muted as producers or distributers of content; only the 'relatively rich' could afford to have a voice with any volume (in a lovely segmented market).
The prospect of a real ISP monopoly scares me shitless, because I just know that they'll continue to take steps to limit free access to the point of only allowing white listed traffic over their lines.
One day we'll see a ToS that says something like, "Port 80 IS the Internet; you get 10mbps down, 28.8kbps up; If we catch you tunneling your file-sharing app we reserve the right to rape you for the lost potential profits of our partners in crime."
Slashdot Mirror
The Asian Invasion continues...with Robot Sumo! ...coming to a tube near you this fall, and hosted by Ota Shinichiro of Iron Chef fame (minus his energetic english translator--he is afraid of robots)!
With these (diamondoid) materials, building a long mag-driven runway a few miles up would actually be safer than a full-scale skyhook, since this platform wouldn't crash-wrap around the planet if it failed at the wrong place. :-)
Saying that 'nanotechnology' 'can't rebuild' something (especially if it worked fine to begin with), is as much of an oxymoron as saying you're a smart retard.
That's an oxymoron.
"Microsoft... Hmm, they're heavily weighted in my [insert stock market instrument]... I better do whatever it takes to give my financial security the upperhand, no matter how small the effect my greed-bias will actually have."
Living on planetary surfaces is actually more costly than building space habitats--using current, not "thousand years" off, technology. And, yes, instead of living on Mars, we could (and probably WILL eventually) rip it apart and spread the material out more efficiently, creating a vastly greater surface area to live in comfortably. Leaving Mars, and the other planets alone, there's still enough asteroidal material to support a *million Earth populations (*I forget the 'exact' estimate, and am too lazy to look it up right now).
There's no future in living on the limited surface area of a select few habitable planets. However, there *is* a future in building our own habitats in freespace; and they'll be able to support populations millions of times larger than any Earth or Mars could.
To quote Gerrard O'Neil (in The High Frontier, p20):
Wealth is highly correlated to energy consumption, and the third world won't be a third world for much longer. So, even without the greenhouse effect, we'll soon be cooking ourselves anyway!........(unless we move our eggs out of the cradle, which is the point of the rest of this "old" book that I pulled the quote from...)
Your wife needs a lesson from George Carlin in American Bullshit:
"...America's most profitable business is still the manufacture, packaging, distribution, and marketing of bullshit. high-quality, grade-A, prime-cut, pure American bullshit."
...
"...stunningly and embarrassingly full of shit"
...
"If honesty were suddenly introduced into American life, the whole system would collapse!"
The best defense is a brain -- there's not much we can do for the blissfully ignorant sheeple. :-)
Question: Why do people even try to charge for information in the first place?
Simple Answer: In order to pay for scarce resources (like food) in the physical world.
Question: What happens when humankind is eventually able to manipulate atoms like bits, reducing the "cost of living" to the cost of computing?
Answer: The equation is now balanced; the physical realm can also be open sourced (as in free beer and free speech (but not free enough to enable a `grey goo' scenario))
This is of course, IMHO, as I really haven't encountered a good treatise on the economics of abundance, and I still worry about an old-economy carryover that keeps a traditional, power-hungy, man-ape pecking order intact--so that a few might rule.
The BEST idea I've yet heard is to build -- once we can manufacture stronger materials like diamondoid -- a miles-high, miles-long launch platform, running parallel to the equator.
The reusable ship(s) and payload would take a ~30-minute elevator ride up to the top of the platform, where atmospheric drag is almost zero, and would then be magnetically accelerated into orbit. It looks to be a very clean and efficient solution, once we can build it; even better than the more romantic skyhook.
Anyone have a link to more info on this? I can't seem to find it.
As for realestate.....well, I plan on moving offworld, inside the first O'Neil Cylinder. There, I can design my own waterfront property (or dissapear into a fantasy reality of utility fog just as real). :-)
However, the cluetrain signatories still represent a minority slice of humanized companies willing to treat people like something other than categorized cattle with credit cards. The majority will continue to spy and track down us cashcows in their black helicopters -- dissecting us, seeking maximum exploitation potential.
And so, I will continue to despise, and block out, the majority of the evil-because-evil-works marketers of the world.
I'm probably a little atypical, but I just can't stand the idea of allowing myself to be mentally engineered by marketing weasels who know too much about me.
Ideally, there should be a truly anonymous way of indicating personal preferences in order to make ads relevant......but that will never happen because it's not as profitable as some snake being able to ferret out the knowledge that the cow sitting behind IP 1.2.3.4 with cookie ABCD911 visted Do-I-Have-The-Clap.com, and then informs all affiliates to increase the exposure of venereal disease ads. At least in the real world you could drive across town (or state lines) to fix a drippy dick (without having to see VD billboards), and no one would be the wiser. Zeroknowledge.
Will Foresight succeed in educating people, or will the public inflate nanotech companies with their hopes and dreams, in the same way as biotech/internet companies, expecting another [stock appreciation] revolution in a "new-new economy?" Of course, we'll get the revolution [of abundance], but I wonder how long it will take people to figure out that there will be even more FuckedCompany's when it finally sinks in what it means to be able to manipulate matter with the same ease as bits of data.
Give me some molecules, some sunlight, a molecular blueprint, the magic nano bootstrap process, and I'm in business!.........unless someone claims a monopoly on atoms or sunlight that is. :)
What if I write in the margins of my textbook?
What if I cover the ads in the newspaper with my hands or a black marker?
What if I skip the commercials when watching a recorded TV show/movie?
You're not a very good devil's advocate if you can't see that the end-user has the right to alter whatever he wants in his content, for his own fair-use.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is a third party, and should not alter someone elses content for you BY DEFAULT, but they still could and should enable people to do it themselves if they want.
No, ads don't pay for content (directly); mindless people are manipulated by ads into paying for content (indirectly). Thus, having the mind in the first place to opt-out harms no one.
Thanks for volunteering for propaganda input!
Some people actually like to think of marketing as providing a valuable service in notifying them of exciting new products and services!......and it usually turns out that I don't like those types of people either, for other reasons related to that mindset.
All advertising also requires that it pass along its cost, adding a premium to whatever is being sold (often in spite of the economies of scale) -- it's a lazy tax worth avoiding for both the dollar AND mental savings.
Will the "mental engineers" honor the wishes of these consumers to be left in peace? Or will they take drastic measures to recapture their audience by technical countermeasures?
I'm still awaiting the first brain-dead website to require some kind of IE-only plugin that, for instance, "shuts off content" if it can't verify the presence of banner pixels onscreen. There's probably better ways to force eyeball burn-in (getting image of Gelfling's strapped to a chair in the Dark Crystal)... but I'm not going to waste much thought on it.
Personally, I block all ads, cookies, popups, etc., except from those sites I trust, and I don't feel I'm "taking advantage" of a free service simply because I choose to think for myself instead of being subjected to annoying influence (aka: advertising). Oh, and when Retinal Scanning Displays finally hit the market, I plan on filtering out real-world ads too (a roadside Coca-cola billboard might be overlayed with a something that says, "Sugar water is not a lifestyle!") :-)
There's no avoiding this eventual best cost/benefit solution; ground based solar conversion is almost as much of a joke as continued use of fossil-fuel is.
The influx of net newbies has slowed -- and most are moving their pr0n queries from the web to file-sharing apps anyway.
Except for maybe swarmcasting lots of redundant data (while at the same time not violating the terms by being a member of "the hive"), we'd effectively be muted as producers or distributers of content; only the 'relatively rich' could afford to have a voice with any volume (in a lovely segmented market).
Nah... It can't get that bad. >:)
One day we'll see a ToS that says something like, "Port 80 IS the Internet; you get 10mbps down, 28.8kbps up; If we catch you tunneling your file-sharing app we reserve the right to rape you for the lost potential profits of our partners in crime."
Hypersensitive admins/firewalls are like retarded versions of Ted Turner cursing out geese for trespassing over his property. :-)
I don't remember since when, but LILO now supports linear address mode, and my linux bootpart happens to live at 10GB just fine.