It's definitely true that this place leans more towards fun than safe: if you don't have bruises, you haven't seen the museum. But common sense will keep you from most harm, a
Well, in your original post you said, "The reason the Dell came out so expensive for the reviewer, is that he insisted that the Dell have the exact same specs as the mac." So I would argue the same point here: does the Mac _have_ to have an Intel chip? Does it _need_ 2GB of RAM? etc., etc.
If, as you said originally, all you need is, "an [sic] capable business machine," then a used iBook likely fits the bill.
Easy to upgrade? Depends -- a five-year-old Mac has a better shot at running Tiger than a five-year-old Dell has of running Vista. Memory is generally not too hard. Hard drives are more difficult, so you have to consider that.
Obviously a used iBook isn't what you're looking for. My original point wasn't that you should go out and get one. It was simply that if you're looking for a $600 Mac laptop, that's your option.
Not sure how I did that, since my point was that none of them broke, and all are still in use. I didn't say they were for my personal use (although I can see how "in my possession" would lead to that conclusion).
My point was that based on the original post, a used laptop would work just fine to meet the requirements.
Well, as long as we're throwing out random facts, I have had in my possession at various times over the last five years about ten Apple laptops, ranging from an original iBook to a PowerBook Bronze up to a current iBook. The sum total among those ten is:
0 dead pixels No spills/stains/whatever The only support needed is for the hinge on the original iBook and the Bronze -- they lost their stiffness over time.
Given that humans are the only mammals where females have enlarged breasts when not needed, I'd say that "big breasted women [are] the only kind of women left."
Do you have evidence that desire for large breasts (and large breasts) are _not_ survival traits?
In any case, sexual selection is a recognized aspect of evolution:
I think this misrepresents how evolution works, as does much popular fiction -- yes, I'm looking at you, Michael Crichton!
Evolution works by random mutation and survival of the fittest. There are two important things to recognize here:
1. The mutations are _random_. They do not happen because a species needs them to survive. 2. Survival of the fittest can only prune out what doesn't work. It can never create what will work.
If the mice and rats happened to have individuals in their populations that were more tolerant of the hostile environment around Chernobyl, then those individuals would breed through the population, and yes, the mice and rats would have a shot at success.
Also, if any mouse happened to receive a mutation that helped, their shorter breeding cycle would help that beneficial mutation move through the entire population more quickly.
BUT -- it is inaccurate to imply that "protection" (resistance) will evolve just because it is needed. No amount of "it would be good if this creature had this feature" can make it happen. If the creature needs the feature to survive, then unless the feature is already hiding somewhere in the creature's genome, the creature will die and go extinct.
The proof of this is in the literally millions of extinct species throughout history. If evolving to survive a threat (such as the radiation around Chernobyl) happened just because the creature needed it, we'd be up to our hips in dinosaurs right now.
By the way, popular reporting often gets this wrong as well -- see most articles on antibiotic resistance.
Then I think what you're looking for (in a Mac) is a used iBook. You can get a 14.1 inch 1Ghz G4 iBook for $569, and I assure you the following:
-- it is a capable business machine
-- it will run the current version of OS X, and almost certainly the next and the one after that.
-- you will still enjoy many of the signature benefits of a Mac -- no viruses, ease of use, etc.
100,000,000,000 -- Let's say 1 in 100 of those are in a good region of the galaxy (not a bunch of cataclysmic crap going on) Thats: 1,000,000,000 -- Let's say 1 in 100 of those have planets. Thats: 10,000,000 -- Let's say 1 in 100 of those have a planet in the stars habitable zone Thats: 100,000 -- Let's say 1 in 100 of those have adequate amounts of water Thats: 1,000 -- Let's say on 1 in 100 of those simple life arises. Thats: 10 -- Let's say on 1 in 100 of those complex life develops. Thats: 0.1 -- Let's say on 1 in 100 of those intelligent life develops. Thats: 0.001 -- Let's say on 1 in 100 of those advanced civilization pops up. Thats: 0.00001
10 planets that foster life per galaxy, and 1 in 100,000 galaxies like ours that develop a single advanced civilization.
Gee, my wild assumptions lead to a very different conclusion than your wild assumptions. I say we're damn lucky we live in a galaxy that developed an advanced civilization, rather than one of the 99,999 that didn't;-)
I've seen the commercial. It starts with just a few people lip-syncing to "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" By the end they show hundreds, maybe thousands of people.
All singing "I'm Not Like Everybody Else"
I think if you look in the dictionary under irony, you see video of this commercial.
(And yes, I know that this comment reflects the common usage definition of irony rather than the dictionary definition. Give me a word that means the common usage definition of irony.)
The Red Team's strategy makes sense for accomplishing the goals as expressed by the rules, but the rules do a poor job of representing the actual goal of the military (IMHO). The DARPA staff said on several occasions, GPS alone won't win this race. Well, it didn't, but only because of some sort of unrelated glitch in the Red Team's entry. Highlander would have won if not for the mystery ailment.
Agreed that in a military situation you're likely to have extensive pre-planning of the route, but you're not going to have driven it before. If it were safe to drive you'd have a person doing the job in the first place;-)
So the robots in the field will be limited to GPS, satellite or aerial surveillance photos, and whatever smarts you can give them. You are exactly correct that the system shouldn't have to find it's own route, but what I meant by that is exactly what you said, "...a system...with enough autonomy to avoid obstacles along the way." If I throw a dozen tires across a ten-foot-wide dirt road, is the robot going to: A. stop and wait for help -- I win; B. turn around and go back -- I win; C. try to go to the left and end up at the bottom of a ravine -- I win; D. try to drive to the right up a hill, roll over and die -- I win; or E. realize (perhaps by cautious experimentation) that the tires aren't really an obstacle and drive over them at reduced speed -- I lose.
Stanley was certainly impressive. Having seen what the Red Team did, though, I have to wonder how capable Stanley's vision system is, and whether they also beefed up their data set before the race. Note that on a dirt road Stanley's vision system, which looks at the smooth road under it and then scans for that ahead, would be particularly susceptible to blockage by used tires (black on brown).
I will be much more impressed when the completion does two things:
1. Gives the team a cd at the start of the race, which the team then has to put into the robot's computer sight unseen. Obviously the data format would be specified ahead of time, but the team would get no chance to enhance the data set.
2. Gives a group of people the chance to play the enemy, with the opportunity to sabotage the robots by altering the path. At first the "enemy" would be limited: limited time and equipment. As the years go by, for this to be realistic, the restrictions on the "enemy" have to be lifted. As I said, if I were the enemy, I doubt any of the robots would have completed;-)
There were several points made in the program that I hadn't heard elsewhere (and I've been paying attention to the Grand Challenge since the initial press release).
-- The teams get the GPS waypoints a few hours before the race. The waypoints are purposefully vague, so the robots have the choice of driving off a cliff (or into one) while still being within GPS parameters. This is supposed to prevent the race from reducing to "Who can follow GPS the best?" The Red Team had a group of what looked like 20 or 30 people who immediately sat down with the waypoints mapped out on satellite imagery, going through and adding waypoints of their own and adding speed commands for their robots. This seems to me to be a big violation of the spirit of the competition.
-- The Red Team had two entries, which they programmed differently: one more aggressive, the other more conservative (on speed). The faster robot, Highlander, was pulling away from Stanley for the first part of the race, until some unknown issue starting causing problems. Nova didn't say what was wrong, but it looked literally like Highlander was slipping out of gear and rolling back down hills. It _might_ have been doing it on purpose, i.e. a software glitch, but it didn't look that way.
-- One of the Red Team's entries completed the last portion (the hardest portion) of the course with its main sensor non-functional -- it was stuck pointed 90 degrees to the side. This argues even more strongly that the Red Team's vehicles weren't doing much route-finding and were pretty much just following GPS waypoints.
The conclusion I draw from this is that we are still a long way from the DOD's goal of autonomous transport vehicles. In a combat situation, transports need to be able to avoid obstacles put in their way _by the enemy_. The only time during this challenge that the vehicles did anything like this was during the initial trials before the race, and that was very limited. The actual race course was hard -- off-road, dirt, narrow, slippery -- but it didn't have tank traps painted the same color as the dirt they rest on. It didn't have razor-wire barricades, forcing the cars to figure out a route through the bushes around them.
I'm confident that if I had been on the course fifteen minutes before the cars showed up, I could have stalled or disabled all of them. Pile a bunch of bushes across the road and all of them would have stopped. During the trials and race, none of them demonstrated the ability to work around such a very limited obstacle.
All of this is not to minimize what was accomplished. But we're a long way from sitting back sipping champagne while robots do the dirty work of war.
Apart from the above countries, it is unlikely that any of these so-called rogue states have anything much more powerful than Fat Man and Little Boy. The first site above lists the damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Note in particular:
-- No casualties were suffered as a result of any persistent radioactivity of fission products of the bomb, or any induced radioactivity of objects near the explosion.
-- The blast totally destroyed everything within a radius of 1 mile and caused significant damage out to about 3 miles.
Anyone who thinks that North Korea is going to figure out a way to send a missile across the Pacific, accurately, and manage to destroy all 465 square miles of Los Angeles, is not checking the facts.
China could destroy Los Angeles. France could, probably. Great Britain, most likely.
India, with 60-90 weapons, would have to place them carefully.
North Korea just can't do it
Which is not to say that hitting Los Angeles with even one nuclear warhead wouldn't hurt.
But consider the situation about a day after that, when the country that launched against Los Angeles isn't there anymore, and the US has used perhaps 5% of its arsenal.
For the record, in a Revolution field on OS X, if you hit the down arrow with the cursor in the middle of the bottom line of text in a field, the cursor will jump to the end of the line, just as it should on a Mac.
In general I agree with the Libertarian approach to corporate misdeeds: make them pay to clean up their own mess.
However, this doesn't address the issue of corporations that do more damage than they can pay for. Enron springs to mind.
If the goal is to allow corporations the freedom to act as they choose until they do something wrong, and then force them to correct their bad actions when they are caught, how would you deal with a situation like Enron, or the Savings and Loan scandals of the 80s?
And saying that these scandals wouldn't have happened if corporations were freed of unnecessary regulation is ducking the issue.;-) Even under a Libertarian system, sooner or later some bozo would cause more damage than he could afford to correct, leaving the people/the government holding the bag.
If the goal is to go cross-platform while maintaining (improving, even) ease-of-development, check out Revolution, it lets you easily target Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac, in an environment that is easier than Visual Basic, but just as powerful. Also consider Revolution's older brother, MetaCard.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been to the City Museum several times, and it is an incredible place. They have an aquarium, a pipe organ, caves, a circus school, a ten-story slide, a bank vault door, and a hall of insects, and that's just scratching the surface. Here is a collection of pictures I took: http://gcanyon.posterous.com/st-louis-is-amazing and a few more: http://gcanyon.posterous.com/more-pictures-from-the-city-museum-in-st-loui
It's definitely true that this place leans more towards fun than safe: if you don't have bruises, you haven't seen the museum. But common sense will keep you from most harm, a
Well, in your original post you said, "The reason the Dell came out so expensive for the reviewer, is that he insisted that the Dell have the exact same specs as the mac." So I would argue the same point here: does the Mac _have_ to have an Intel chip? Does it _need_ 2GB of RAM? etc., etc.
If, as you said originally, all you need is, "an [sic] capable business machine," then a used iBook likely fits the bill.
Easy to upgrade? Depends -- a five-year-old Mac has a better shot at running Tiger than a five-year-old Dell has of running Vista. Memory is generally not too hard. Hard drives are more difficult, so you have to consider that.
Obviously a used iBook isn't what you're looking for. My original point wasn't that you should go out and get one. It was simply that if you're looking for a $600 Mac laptop, that's your option.
I'm done now.
Not sure how I did that, since my point was that none of them broke, and all are still in use. I didn't say they were for my personal use (although I can see how "in my possession" would lead to that conclusion).
My point was that based on the original post, a used laptop would work just fine to meet the requirements.
Well, as long as we're throwing out random facts, I have had in my possession at various times over the last five years about ten Apple laptops, ranging from an original iBook to a PowerBook Bronze up to a current iBook. The sum total among those ten is:
0 dead pixels
No spills/stains/whatever
The only support needed is for the hinge on the original iBook and the Bronze -- they lost their stiffness over time.
Given that humans are the only mammals where females have enlarged breasts when not needed, I'd say that "big breasted women [are] the only kind of women left."
Do you have evidence that desire for large breasts (and large breasts) are _not_ survival traits?
In any case, sexual selection is a recognized aspect of evolution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection
So it's perfectly reasonable to consider the possibility that large breasts are a genetically-determined, sexually selected trait in humans.
I think this misrepresents how evolution works, as does much popular fiction -- yes, I'm looking at you, Michael Crichton!
Evolution works by random mutation and survival of the fittest. There are two important things to recognize here:
1. The mutations are _random_. They do not happen because a species needs them to survive.
2. Survival of the fittest can only prune out what doesn't work. It can never create what will work.
If the mice and rats happened to have individuals in their populations that were more tolerant of the hostile environment around Chernobyl, then those individuals would breed through the population, and yes, the mice and rats would have a shot at success.
Also, if any mouse happened to receive a mutation that helped, their shorter breeding cycle would help that beneficial mutation move through the entire population more quickly.
BUT -- it is inaccurate to imply that "protection" (resistance) will evolve just because it is needed. No amount of "it would be good if this creature had this feature" can make it happen. If the creature needs the feature to survive, then unless the feature is already hiding somewhere in the creature's genome, the creature will die and go extinct.
The proof of this is in the literally millions of extinct species throughout history. If evolving to survive a threat (such as the radiation around Chernobyl) happened just because the creature needed it, we'd be up to our hips in dinosaurs right now.
By the way, popular reporting often gets this wrong as well -- see most articles on antibiotic resistance.
Then I think what you're looking for (in a Mac) is a used iBook. You can get a 14.1 inch 1Ghz G4 iBook for $569, and I assure you the following:
-- it is a capable business machine
-- it will run the current version of OS X, and almost certainly the next and the one after that.
-- you will still enjoy many of the signature benefits of a Mac -- no viruses, ease of use, etc.
Please:
;-)
s
Start with 100 Billion stars in our galaxy:
100,000,000,000 -- Let's say 1 in 100 of those are in a good region of the galaxy (not a bunch of cataclysmic crap going on)
Thats: 1,000,000,000 -- Let's say 1 in 100 of those have planets.
Thats: 10,000,000 -- Let's say 1 in 100 of those have a planet in the stars habitable zone
Thats: 100,000 -- Let's say 1 in 100 of those have adequate amounts of water
Thats: 1,000 -- Let's say on 1 in 100 of those simple life arises.
Thats: 10 -- Let's say on 1 in 100 of those complex life develops.
Thats: 0.1 -- Let's say on 1 in 100 of those intelligent life develops.
Thats: 0.001 -- Let's say on 1 in 100 of those advanced civilization pops up.
Thats: 0.00001
10 planets that foster life per galaxy,
and 1 in 100,000 galaxies like ours that develop a single advanced civilization.
Gee, my wild assumptions lead to a very different conclusion than your wild assumptions. I say we're damn lucky we live in a galaxy that developed an advanced civilization, rather than one of the 99,999 that didn't
For further reading on how rare we might be (and some slightly less wild assumptions):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesi
Given that Microsoft doesn't want PC manufacturers to sell naked boxes -- http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/05/142521 6 -- this makes a Mac a good way to buy a PC without Windows.
I've seen the commercial. It starts with just a few people lip-syncing to "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" By the end they show hundreds, maybe thousands of people.
All singing "I'm Not Like Everybody Else"
I think if you look in the dictionary under irony, you see video of this commercial.
(And yes, I know that this comment reflects the common usage definition of irony rather than the dictionary definition. Give me a word that means the common usage definition of irony.)
The Red Team's strategy makes sense for accomplishing the goals as expressed by the rules, but the rules do a poor job of representing the actual goal of the military (IMHO). The DARPA staff said on several occasions, GPS alone won't win this race. Well, it didn't, but only because of some sort of unrelated glitch in the Red Team's entry. Highlander would have won if not for the mystery ailment.
;-)
;-)
Agreed that in a military situation you're likely to have extensive pre-planning of the route, but you're not going to have driven it before. If it were safe to drive you'd have a person doing the job in the first place
So the robots in the field will be limited to GPS, satellite or aerial surveillance photos, and whatever smarts you can give them. You are exactly correct that the system shouldn't have to find it's own route, but what I meant by that is exactly what you said, "...a system...with enough autonomy to avoid obstacles along the way." If I throw a dozen tires across a ten-foot-wide dirt road, is the robot going to: A. stop and wait for help -- I win; B. turn around and go back -- I win; C. try to go to the left and end up at the bottom of a ravine -- I win; D. try to drive to the right up a hill, roll over and die -- I win; or E. realize (perhaps by cautious experimentation) that the tires aren't really an obstacle and drive over them at reduced speed -- I lose.
Stanley was certainly impressive. Having seen what the Red Team did, though, I have to wonder how capable Stanley's vision system is, and whether they also beefed up their data set before the race. Note that on a dirt road Stanley's vision system, which looks at the smooth road under it and then scans for that ahead, would be particularly susceptible to blockage by used tires (black on brown).
I will be much more impressed when the completion does two things:
1. Gives the team a cd at the start of the race, which the team then has to put into the robot's computer sight unseen. Obviously the data format would be specified ahead of time, but the team would get no chance to enhance the data set.
2. Gives a group of people the chance to play the enemy, with the opportunity to sabotage the robots by altering the path. At first the "enemy" would be limited: limited time and equipment. As the years go by, for this to be realistic, the restrictions on the "enemy" have to be lifted. As I said, if I were the enemy, I doubt any of the robots would have completed
There were several points made in the program that I hadn't heard elsewhere (and I've been paying attention to the Grand Challenge since the initial press release).
-- The teams get the GPS waypoints a few hours before the race. The waypoints are purposefully vague, so the robots have the choice of driving off a cliff (or into one) while still being within GPS parameters. This is supposed to prevent the race from reducing to "Who can follow GPS the best?" The Red Team had a group of what looked like 20 or 30 people who immediately sat down with the waypoints mapped out on satellite imagery, going through and adding waypoints of their own and adding speed commands for their robots. This seems to me to be a big violation of the spirit of the competition.
-- The Red Team had two entries, which they programmed differently: one more aggressive, the other more conservative (on speed). The faster robot, Highlander, was pulling away from Stanley for the first part of the race, until some unknown issue starting causing problems. Nova didn't say what was wrong, but it looked literally like Highlander was slipping out of gear and rolling back down hills. It _might_ have been doing it on purpose, i.e. a software glitch, but it didn't look that way.
-- One of the Red Team's entries completed the last portion (the hardest portion) of the course with its main sensor non-functional -- it was stuck pointed 90 degrees to the side. This argues even more strongly that the Red Team's vehicles weren't doing much route-finding and were pretty much just following GPS waypoints.
The conclusion I draw from this is that we are still a long way from the DOD's goal of autonomous transport vehicles. In a combat situation, transports need to be able to avoid obstacles put in their way _by the enemy_. The only time during this challenge that the vehicles did anything like this was during the initial trials before the race, and that was very limited. The actual race course was hard -- off-road, dirt, narrow, slippery -- but it didn't have tank traps painted the same color as the dirt they rest on. It didn't have razor-wire barricades, forcing the cars to figure out a route through the bushes around them.
I'm confident that if I had been on the course fifteen minutes before the cars showed up, I could have stalled or disabled all of them. Pile a bunch of bushes across the road and all of them would have stopped. During the trials and race, none of them demonstrated the ability to work around such a very limited obstacle.
All of this is not to minimize what was accomplished. But we're a long way from sitting back sipping champagne while robots do the dirty work of war.
Unless we are expecting an attack from Russia, Great Britain, France, or China, we are not talking about MAD.
t ml/
t h_nuclear_weapons more carefully than some apparently have.
Read http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp3.sh
Then read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_wi
Apart from the above countries, it is unlikely that any of these so-called rogue states have anything much more powerful than Fat Man and Little Boy. The first site above lists the damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Note in particular:
-- No casualties were suffered as a result of any persistent radioactivity of fission products of the bomb, or any induced radioactivity of objects near the explosion.
-- The blast totally destroyed everything within a radius of 1 mile and caused significant damage out to about 3 miles.
Anyone who thinks that North Korea is going to figure out a way to send a missile across the Pacific, accurately, and manage to destroy all 465 square miles of Los Angeles, is not checking the facts.
China could destroy Los Angeles.
France could, probably.
Great Britain, most likely.
India, with 60-90 weapons, would have to place them carefully.
North Korea just can't do it
Which is not to say that hitting Los Angeles with even one nuclear warhead wouldn't hurt.
But consider the situation about a day after that, when the country that launched against Los Angeles isn't there anymore, and the US has used perhaps 5% of its arsenal.
MAD indeed.
I was caught by that as well. I think they mean that it can fast forward or reverse at up to 128x normal speed. Don't know about export...
For the record, in a Revolution field on OS X, if you hit the down arrow with the cursor in the middle of the bottom line of text in a field, the cursor will jump to the end of the line, just as it should on a Mac.
In general I agree with the Libertarian approach to corporate misdeeds: make them pay to clean up their own mess.
;-) Even under a Libertarian system, sooner or later some bozo would cause more damage than he could afford to correct, leaving the people/the government holding the bag.
However, this doesn't address the issue of corporations that do more damage than they can pay for. Enron springs to mind.
If the goal is to allow corporations the freedom to act as they choose until they do something wrong, and then force them to correct their bad actions when they are caught, how would you deal with a situation like Enron, or the Savings and Loan scandals of the 80s?
And saying that these scandals wouldn't have happened if corporations were freed of unnecessary regulation is ducking the issue.
If the goal is to go cross-platform while maintaining (improving, even) ease-of-development, check out Revolution, it lets you easily target Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac, in an environment that is easier than Visual Basic, but just as powerful. Also consider Revolution's older brother, MetaCard.