Halo didn't have anything that it really called its own.
Halo had a plotline, which IMO is severely lacking in the FPS genre. True, the technical improvements in the game between 1 and 2 were minimal (and in some cases regressed; see my comment about the Magnum, above), but I don't think that's as horrible as you're making it out to be.
If they can continue to refine the gaming experience that people have gotten used to with Halo 1 and 2, I'd take that as a success. I'd rather they continued the plot, refined gameplay, and took basically conservative steps than if they changed something radically for the sake of change, and messed up a good thing. Not every game needs some kind of "hook" that's been cooked up to make it artificially unique: particularly if the appeal of the game is that it's just a really good shooter.
The Halo games at this point are a known quantity; there are other games you can buy if you want something gimmicky (or "innovative," the difference between an innovation and a gimmick being rather difficult to tell without the benefit of hindsight). I think it takes a certain amount of balls to realize when you've got a good thing and should just stop changing it.
With that said, unfortunately I doubt Microsoft will ever let Bungie just stop making new Halo games; they'll flog the franchise as long as they possibly can, until it becomes ridiculous.
I got a Bluetooth hands-free unit recently, to use in the car, and my first thought was "too bad they didn't put the whole phone in there."
Obviously the voice-recognition in current phones isn't good enough to do this, but I could imagine that if it got better that you could do away with the button-pad completely except as some sort of add-on device. Or use a Bluetooth-enabled PDA or computer as the keypad and for programming. The sole purpose of the phone would be to interpret voice commands and make calls -- in fact it wouldn't have to even have that much processing power, since you could do the voice recognition on the network end. Just open a connection, and start giving it commands. (Like an operator-assisted traditional call, without the human operator.)
Once you remove the keypad, display, camera, and all the other cruft, I think you could probably get the essential cellphone components down to the size of something that you could wear on or in your ear. Dialing would be through a voice interface, as well as basic PDA type functions ("What appointments do I have this afternoon?" = "You have a 3pm appointment with Joe Quimby, 4pm with Jill Summers..."). This could be accomplished either by using a WLAN to connect to a PDA, or by using the cell network to access an internet-enabled calendar.
But I definitely think that as long as you're re-envisioning the cellphone, it's time to look beyond a brick-like thing that you keep in your pocket and hold to your face. The technical reasons for having that are dwindling, and there are enough advantages to support at least a niche market for a much more compact, always-present form of telecommunications.
Would some people hate this? Sure -- but enough people seem to walk around with BT headsets on their ears that I think there'd be a market for ones even smaller and lighter and more transparent.
Not as long as you can still use old-style passports.
I have personally entered the country using a passport that could have been made in a basement, with nary a glance. This was one that was made up at a U.S. embassy abroad, and consisted of a blank passport with my information typed in, and a Polaroid photo cut and rubber-cemented into the front cover. The biggest "security feature" on it was that the corner of the photo was embossed after it had been glued down. Very 19th century; in fact the whole thing looked like something that would have been right at home on the HMS Titanic.
I'm sure that if I had looked significantly more tan, I probably would have gotten the turn-your-head-and-cough treatment while going through Customs for traveling on a passport like that, but the fact is I don't look like a terrorist and I waltzed right through.
As long as any sort of passport without a security feature is still valid, and doesn't earn you additional scrutiny at the border, there's little point in implementing it.
There is the physical passport, and then there is a chip on it, which has your photo stored digitally.
If somebody steals your passport, they'd have to replace your photo on the chip with their own, which involves probably breaking the government's digital signature (so they can encrypt and sign their own photo). This is an additional step on top of what they would have to do with your passport right now, which lacks a chip.
If somebody scans your passport and doesn't take the physical item, all they have is your photo -- which is nothing more than they could have gotten by using a visual scanner (camera) and looking at your mug anyway.
I don't understand your "cloning" fear; anything they'd have to do digitally would be in addition to the analog forgery they have to do already, so it wouldn't make their job any easier.
My problem with this procedure is that the long phase-in time makes it basically a complete waste: by the time that they stop accepting old-style passports at the border, the equipment to duplicate the chips will be in wide circulation and the benefit of requring the forgers to complete an additional step will be minimal. If they wanted to increase security, they'd have to recall everyone's passports today, issue new ones, and then say that the old ones were no longer valid -- a political and logistical impossibility. Without strong evidence showing that the system will still be secure in 10 years, I question if it's worth the cost. However, the risk to users seems minimal.
Read the post above yours. The covers of the passport act like a Faraday cage. I'd still like to see tests of whether you can saturate the passport with enough RF to actuate the chip using a small parabolic antenna (and disregarding normal safety standards), but it does seem like they've considered this possibility. That's a small good sign.
More importantly though, if they can pick your pocket, they can just steal your passport and then do anything with it that they want, so I think that's really not a great criticism. This technology doesn't really close that most traditional avenue of attacks.
Re:Americans traveling to other countries.
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E-Passport In the Works
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't think there's a man, woman or child alive that wouldn't want more than 2 weeks vacation. This is not a "cultural habit", this is just the dynamic of our employer/employee relationship. Employers want to ride their employees as hard as they can and employees are just doing all they can not to get fired.
I disagree. I know a lot of people who don't even take their available 14 days/year of vacation, even though they're not at any risk of being fired if they did.
Actually, very few people in my line of work are at risk of being fired. On the contrary, people are motivated by wanting promotions and to get ahead of the next guy. If you gave everyone 4 weeks of vacation, they probably wouldn't see it as an opportunity to take more vacation, but as an opportunity to work more hours than other people, and thereby get promoted more quickly. Or if you're paid hourly, get more overtime.
And we're not talking about wage slavery here either; the people I know who chronically give up their vacations aren't scraping by to make rent, they're trying to get promoted so they can get a better apartment, a nicer car, a more expensive suit, etc.
I think that people give up vacation much more readily because they want to get ahead, than because they're afraid of losing their jobs. You'd probably have grounds for wrongful termination if you got fired for taking your allowed vacation (2 weeks), yet most people don't even take that. Why? It's not because they want to stay in their current jobs, it's because they want to get more, and given the choice between vacation now, and the chance at making more money later, people take the shot at promotion. It's not fear, it's a desire for betterment (aka greed; your choice of terms).
What I do think would be popular here would be the ability to take your vacation and sick time as cash. If you required companies to give employees their unused vacation time at the end of the year, I'd bet that you'd see the amount of vacation go down even further as people chose cash over leisure time. In Europe, where they effectively have that option already, it's less popular. Obviously, there are differing values at work.
As a society, or at least as a subset of one, we need to discuss this. Where should the "expectation of privacy" be when one is using a search engine (or the Internet in general)? It's a very open question.
On one hand, most people I think realize that the query to the search engine is not 'private.' As in, you can go and view at any given time, all the things that are being typed in to Google. (At least you used to be able to, or maybe this was Yahoo.) At any rate, the queries themselves are not secret.
However, what freaks people out is that one query can be associated with another. So if I type in my name, I expect that somebody on the far end knows that I'm searching for my name. However, what people don't expect, is that it's possible to link together all the searches that they've made (potentially across multiple computers, if there's a login system). So that my search for my name today, could be cross-referenced with my search for restaurants in a particular area tomorrow, and cross-referenced further with some street address I search for the day after that.
Individually, only a very naive person would expect a query to be private. However, it's the cross-referenced information sorted by particular users that is concievably private, because it reveals much more than simple queries do.
Let's imagine for instance that AOL had released the same number of searches, but instead of listing the IP address (or a unique identifier that's matched 1:1 with an IP address) they just gave a time/date stamp when it was made. We probably wouldn't be having this conversation, and a few executives would still have their jobs.
Where people expect some sort of privacy (reasonably or not) is in not having one particular "search session" linked to other ones. In fact, I bet that most un-technical people probably think that they can close their browser, and thus 'start over'...not realizing that when they start searching again, it just continues adding to a list of queries from earlier. That "recordkeeping" is where the perceived invasion occurs, not in the lack of secrecy of the terms themselves.
Although in the end, which browser you want to use is a personal choice, I think spellchecking is superior in Konqueror than in Firefox.
In Konqueror (recent versions, KDE 3.5+ I think), you can have it automatically underline misspelled words, while in Firefox you have to manually run the spellchecker and use it through a modal window. I'm sorry, 1996 called, and they want their spellchecking interface back. There's no reason why you should have to do anything except right-click for alternative spellings; forcing the user to right-click, choose Check Spelling, and then go through the entire text field manually is a waste of time.
That alone is enough to keep me from using Firefox seriously (except on Windows, where I've yet to find anything much better, although I admit to not looking or caring much). Actually I think the MacOS does things best of all here with Safari, because it handles spell-checking at the system level -- every application looks and works the same way, and accesses the same dictionaries. There's no reason for your web browser to use a separate spell-checking system from your email program, or anything else. Pity it's so damn slow at rendering complex pages.
Newer versions of Konqueror also have adblock built in, not as an extension but as part of the browser itself. It's trivial to load up Filterset.G and have a browsing experience that's similar to what you'd have with Firefox. Although I admit, it's not quite as easy to block additional images or servers or temporarily disable blocking as with other systems -- there's definitely room for improvement here. And for Flashblocking, you have to go into the preferences and disable it. (Actually I think both Firefox and Konqueror would do well to look at the shareware PithHelmet for Safari, which even offers some additional features I've yet to see elsewhere.)
Both browsers have things that they could definitely learn from each other, and I'm not sure either one is clearly superior. However, I think that in terms of a cohesive user experience particularly for online forum use, recent versions of Konqueror win out.
and when/if we will finally have such powerful AI, the stock exchange will be our last concern.
I agreed with you right up until this point. I think that when we do get an AI that powerful, the very first thing anyone will do with it, is put it to work gaming the stock market. Maybe after that, someone will try asking it for the cure for cancer or how to bring about world peace. But I'm pretty sure that "what's the next Yahoo?" will be first.
In a similar vein, I'm pretty sure if anyone ever builds a device to see into the future, Priority Number 1 will be to get the next week's PowerBall numbers.
Actually, you can make a water-powered car in your own garage. You'll need a lot of water, though, and you'll constantly need to move the water from the bottom to the top of the engine.
Not if it's a very small car, and you only drive when it's raining.
Um, I think you need to read up on your Newton's Law of Cooling again.
If we increase the flow of heat into a body, then its temperature will increase. The rate at which it loses heat to the environment is proportional to the difference between the body and the environment, so it will eventually reach a new equilibrium temperature -- the temperature of the body, in other words, will never just continue to increase up and up.
However, the equilibrium temperature of the body WILL increase. This is pretty simple when you think about it. If you have a fish tank, and you have a 10W heater in it, and it stays constant at 80 degrees (meaning that heat in equals heat out), and then you put a second 10W heater in the tank, the temperature is not going to remain the same. The temperature is going to go up until the heat loss into the environment is the same as the input, and then it will remain in that state.
So any vast new source of energy (and I really mean vast) could potentially cause global warming, by increasing the equilibrium temperature of the Earth as a system, so that it radiates heat into space at the same rate it's being introduced into the system.
That said, I'm not sure that human beings will have it in our power to introduce enough power to the system so that the equilibrium temperature increases significantly. I think it would have to be a fair fraction of the power coming in from the sun and being produced by geologic activity, many thousands or millions of times our current power consumption. And it would all have to come from non-renewable ("new energy") sources. I think the risks of biosphere damage that would make the planet uninhabitable via other means are a bigger risk than just raising the temperature by pumping energy into it. There are many ways to kill ourselves that would require a lot less work.
No, but I might respect him/them more a scientist/group of scientists.
Right now I trust that they're excellent businessmen. However, that gives me absolutely zero faith in their technology, which is what they're basically asking for.
When he mentioned 'vacuum energy' I thought it was like some kind of great big vacuum chamber and when you let the air back in, it turns a wind turbine.
Well, your "vacuum energy" would actually work....
If it's true, someone will patent it and it won't be free - on the contrary, it will still somehow cost me as much as energy does now, as greed seems to outpace progress these days.
Right; because damned if human greed hasn't kept the price of those computer chips right up where they always have been, $60 per 1000 transistors [1], keeping all the profits for themselves. Corporate bastards.
You can't make troops more committed to the battle by taking away amenities; all that's going to do is make them less committed, less trusting of their command structure, and less eager to risk their lives. It's the "we'll stop beating you when morale improves" school of leadership, and it only works when you're trying to get people to do mindless manual labor, under close supervision. In short, you can't make good soldiers through force or coercion.
A more general form of your (and Kurtz's) point is that the motivation which drives a force is supremely important in warfare, and there is a certain question in my mind today as to what that motivation is supposed to be, for our troops. It's not exactly clear what the purpose of the war was or is, and frankly I don't think that many Americans can get all that wound up over bringing democracy to a bunch of people who aren't that interested anyway. I think that if you really asked the right questions, you'd probably figure out that most soldiers' motivation is a lot less big-picture and a lot more personal; they're in Iraq because they're career military and want the combat time, or because they want the respect that it'll garner them back home, or just because they thought it would be more interesting than whatever job they would have been doing Stateside. Maybe they think it gives them some personal insight. Everyone has his or her own.
You'd do better to try and find what actually does drive our troops, and encourage that, rather than trying to create a motivation out of fear and misery where there really isn't one now. Where Kurtz was wrong was in likening U.S. troops to Charlie too closely: you can't motivate them in the same way to fight, because they're each there for such totally different reasons, the same things won't work.
It's not like any other large nations (or the companies that run them) would withhold life saving treatments from those in need of them to gain economic advantages....
What, this surprises you? Human life has always been cheap when it comes to the scale of nations. People have empathy for each other; I've yet to see anything that demonstrates such feelings from abstract legal constructs.
If the situation ever came down to one of actual perceived cultural survival, I have no doubt that all the feel-good welfare states of the Western hemisphere would be sending out smallpox-laced blankets to the teeming masses of the Third World, if they thought that would somehow increase their own chances for survival; not only as individuals, but as a coherent civilization.
People as individuals are capable of surprising ruthlessness when threatened, and groups of people (where individuals can spread responsibility for decisions among the group) even more so.
The machine I bought from Retrobox (HP xw5000, which aside from doubling as a space heater, I highly recommend) does not have a Windows sticker on it. It has a suspiciously sticky place on the top-left corner of the right side of the chassis, where one might have been at some point affixed, but it's been removed.
The machines come without any Windows license at all, and they're pretty up-front about this.
Whether this is to protect the identity of the companies that they came from, or have something to do with letting the companies retain and reuse the licenses (can they do that?), I have no idea. But the machines definitely come without one, although RetroBox will happily sell you a retail copy of WinXP and install it for you, if you'd like. I opted not.
My band is unsigned...iTunes is a potential cash cow for forward-thinking bands.
I think you just answered your own question. The problem here is that too many artists are lured into thinking that the only way to make a living in music is to sign away your soul to record label, for pennies on the dollar.
Now I'll grant you that I don't really know much about the intricacies of the music business, but based on conversations I've had with quite a few people lately, it seems like an artist would perhaps be better served staying unsigned -- if they have any management skills at all, or know where to find someone who does -- than to get on board with a label. What does the label give you? A chance at a very, very small slice of a larger "pie," but really what's the advantage of that over having a much larger slice of a smaller pie?
If you get 91% back from your music sales, it doesn't take nearly as many sales for you to make a living than it does for a signed band. I'd bet that properly done, the margins on CD sales are similarly large. Sure, you probably won't see an unsigned band's stuff in WalMart, but again: if you can make the same amount of money being a regional band, and have total creative control... I don't understand the allure.
The one thing that the labels still seem to have is a pretty tight grip on the music flowing into radio stations, particularly the corporate controlled (*cough*ClearChannel*cough*) ones; but the relevance of that mode of distribution is fading daily. Particularly if your audience is in a younger demographic, it doesn't seem like radio play is necessarily the requirement for sales that it once was.
I guess maybe I'm not a musician and I don't understand the desire for fame that might lead someone to believe that being nationally recognized is a good thing per se, versus making the same amount of money as a regional band, and not feeling like they're taking it up the ass every day. If someone can explain what the value proposition of the record labels is, in today's economy, where it's widely known that they compensate artists poorly and essentially do nothing but take your music as payment for questionable PR campaigns, I'd be interested.
Yeah but who watches their TV for 24 hours a day? That's kind of a ridiculous comparison.
Particularly since most people I know who have projectors, don't use it as their only viewing device. You keep whatever analog TV you're currently using around for casual ("background noise") viewing, and only run the PJ when you want to sit down and seriously watch that game/movie/etc.
I'd guess that most people who own a projector probably use it on the order of a few hours a day or less, meaning that the bulb costs get amortized over a long period. The TCO is very good -- the downsides to a projector really have to do with the screen, space, and mounting requirements, and lighting (need a dark room). Cost-wise, they're by far the cheapest way to get big-screen, high-quality HD.
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Halo didn't have anything that it really called its own.
Halo had a plotline, which IMO is severely lacking in the FPS genre. True, the technical improvements in the game between 1 and 2 were minimal (and in some cases regressed; see my comment about the Magnum, above), but I don't think that's as horrible as you're making it out to be.
If they can continue to refine the gaming experience that people have gotten used to with Halo 1 and 2, I'd take that as a success. I'd rather they continued the plot, refined gameplay, and took basically conservative steps than if they changed something radically for the sake of change, and messed up a good thing. Not every game needs some kind of "hook" that's been cooked up to make it artificially unique: particularly if the appeal of the game is that it's just a really good shooter.
The Halo games at this point are a known quantity; there are other games you can buy if you want something gimmicky (or "innovative," the difference between an innovation and a gimmick being rather difficult to tell without the benefit of hindsight). I think it takes a certain amount of balls to realize when you've got a good thing and should just stop changing it.
With that said, unfortunately I doubt Microsoft will ever let Bungie just stop making new Halo games; they'll flog the franchise as long as they possibly can, until it becomes ridiculous.
All I want to know is, did they make the pistol suck less than it does in Halo 2? Because that was a bit disappointing.
I was thinking about the same thing.
I got a Bluetooth hands-free unit recently, to use in the car, and my first thought was "too bad they didn't put the whole phone in there."
Obviously the voice-recognition in current phones isn't good enough to do this, but I could imagine that if it got better that you could do away with the button-pad completely except as some sort of add-on device. Or use a Bluetooth-enabled PDA or computer as the keypad and for programming. The sole purpose of the phone would be to interpret voice commands and make calls -- in fact it wouldn't have to even have that much processing power, since you could do the voice recognition on the network end. Just open a connection, and start giving it commands. (Like an operator-assisted traditional call, without the human operator.)
Once you remove the keypad, display, camera, and all the other cruft, I think you could probably get the essential cellphone components down to the size of something that you could wear on or in your ear. Dialing would be through a voice interface, as well as basic PDA type functions ("What appointments do I have this afternoon?" = "You have a 3pm appointment with Joe Quimby, 4pm with Jill Summers..."). This could be accomplished either by using a WLAN to connect to a PDA, or by using the cell network to access an internet-enabled calendar.
But I definitely think that as long as you're re-envisioning the cellphone, it's time to look beyond a brick-like thing that you keep in your pocket and hold to your face. The technical reasons for having that are dwindling, and there are enough advantages to support at least a niche market for a much more compact, always-present form of telecommunications.
Would some people hate this? Sure -- but enough people seem to walk around with BT headsets on their ears that I think there'd be a market for ones even smaller and lighter and more transparent.
Not as long as you can still use old-style passports.
I have personally entered the country using a passport that could have been made in a basement, with nary a glance. This was one that was made up at a U.S. embassy abroad, and consisted of a blank passport with my information typed in, and a Polaroid photo cut and rubber-cemented into the front cover. The biggest "security feature" on it was that the corner of the photo was embossed after it had been glued down. Very 19th century; in fact the whole thing looked like something that would have been right at home on the HMS Titanic.
I'm sure that if I had looked significantly more tan, I probably would have gotten the turn-your-head-and-cough treatment while going through Customs for traveling on a passport like that, but the fact is I don't look like a terrorist and I waltzed right through.
As long as any sort of passport without a security feature is still valid, and doesn't earn you additional scrutiny at the border, there's little point in implementing it.
That doesn't make any sense.
There is the physical passport, and then there is a chip on it, which has your photo stored digitally.
If somebody steals your passport, they'd have to replace your photo on the chip with their own, which involves probably breaking the government's digital signature (so they can encrypt and sign their own photo). This is an additional step on top of what they would have to do with your passport right now, which lacks a chip.
If somebody scans your passport and doesn't take the physical item, all they have is your photo -- which is nothing more than they could have gotten by using a visual scanner (camera) and looking at your mug anyway.
I don't understand your "cloning" fear; anything they'd have to do digitally would be in addition to the analog forgery they have to do already, so it wouldn't make their job any easier.
My problem with this procedure is that the long phase-in time makes it basically a complete waste: by the time that they stop accepting old-style passports at the border, the equipment to duplicate the chips will be in wide circulation and the benefit of requring the forgers to complete an additional step will be minimal. If they wanted to increase security, they'd have to recall everyone's passports today, issue new ones, and then say that the old ones were no longer valid -- a political and logistical impossibility. Without strong evidence showing that the system will still be secure in 10 years, I question if it's worth the cost. However, the risk to users seems minimal.
Yeah, because 90% of Americans aren't painfully obvious in a crowd in any foreign city already.
Seriously; even in most Western countries, the "average American" sticks out like a recently-hammered thumb; doubly so when they start talking.
Only a very small percentage of Americans will ever pass as a native in any other country except their own.
Read the post above yours. The covers of the passport act like a Faraday cage. I'd still like to see tests of whether you can saturate the passport with enough RF to actuate the chip using a small parabolic antenna (and disregarding normal safety standards), but it does seem like they've considered this possibility. That's a small good sign.
More importantly though, if they can pick your pocket, they can just steal your passport and then do anything with it that they want, so I think that's really not a great criticism. This technology doesn't really close that most traditional avenue of attacks.
I don't think there's a man, woman or child alive that wouldn't want more than 2 weeks vacation. This is not a "cultural habit", this is just the dynamic of our employer/employee relationship. Employers want to ride their employees as hard as they can and employees are just doing all they can not to get fired.
I disagree. I know a lot of people who don't even take their available 14 days/year of vacation, even though they're not at any risk of being fired if they did.
Actually, very few people in my line of work are at risk of being fired. On the contrary, people are motivated by wanting promotions and to get ahead of the next guy. If you gave everyone 4 weeks of vacation, they probably wouldn't see it as an opportunity to take more vacation, but as an opportunity to work more hours than other people, and thereby get promoted more quickly. Or if you're paid hourly, get more overtime.
And we're not talking about wage slavery here either; the people I know who chronically give up their vacations aren't scraping by to make rent, they're trying to get promoted so they can get a better apartment, a nicer car, a more expensive suit, etc.
I think that people give up vacation much more readily because they want to get ahead, than because they're afraid of losing their jobs. You'd probably have grounds for wrongful termination if you got fired for taking your allowed vacation (2 weeks), yet most people don't even take that. Why? It's not because they want to stay in their current jobs, it's because they want to get more, and given the choice between vacation now, and the chance at making more money later, people take the shot at promotion. It's not fear, it's a desire for betterment (aka greed; your choice of terms).
What I do think would be popular here would be the ability to take your vacation and sick time as cash. If you required companies to give employees their unused vacation time at the end of the year, I'd bet that you'd see the amount of vacation go down even further as people chose cash over leisure time. In Europe, where they effectively have that option already, it's less popular. Obviously, there are differing values at work.
Why would it be foolish? AOL search is just Google, anyway.
Yeah, it's all the creepiness of Google, but without the "do no evil" oversight. What could possibly be wrong with that?
I think you bring up a good point.
As a society, or at least as a subset of one, we need to discuss this. Where should the "expectation of privacy" be when one is using a search engine (or the Internet in general)? It's a very open question.
On one hand, most people I think realize that the query to the search engine is not 'private.' As in, you can go and view at any given time, all the things that are being typed in to Google. (At least you used to be able to, or maybe this was Yahoo.) At any rate, the queries themselves are not secret.
However, what freaks people out is that one query can be associated with another. So if I type in my name, I expect that somebody on the far end knows that I'm searching for my name. However, what people don't expect, is that it's possible to link together all the searches that they've made (potentially across multiple computers, if there's a login system). So that my search for my name today, could be cross-referenced with my search for restaurants in a particular area tomorrow, and cross-referenced further with some street address I search for the day after that.
Individually, only a very naive person would expect a query to be private. However, it's the cross-referenced information sorted by particular users that is concievably private, because it reveals much more than simple queries do.
Let's imagine for instance that AOL had released the same number of searches, but instead of listing the IP address (or a unique identifier that's matched 1:1 with an IP address) they just gave a time/date stamp when it was made. We probably wouldn't be having this conversation, and a few executives would still have their jobs.
Where people expect some sort of privacy (reasonably or not) is in not having one particular "search session" linked to other ones. In fact, I bet that most un-technical people probably think that they can close their browser, and thus 'start over'...not realizing that when they start searching again, it just continues adding to a list of queries from earlier. That "recordkeeping" is where the perceived invasion occurs, not in the lack of secrecy of the terms themselves.
Although in the end, which browser you want to use is a personal choice, I think spellchecking is superior in Konqueror than in Firefox.
In Konqueror (recent versions, KDE 3.5+ I think), you can have it automatically underline misspelled words, while in Firefox you have to manually run the spellchecker and use it through a modal window. I'm sorry, 1996 called, and they want their spellchecking interface back. There's no reason why you should have to do anything except right-click for alternative spellings; forcing the user to right-click, choose Check Spelling, and then go through the entire text field manually is a waste of time.
That alone is enough to keep me from using Firefox seriously (except on Windows, where I've yet to find anything much better, although I admit to not looking or caring much). Actually I think the MacOS does things best of all here with Safari, because it handles spell-checking at the system level -- every application looks and works the same way, and accesses the same dictionaries. There's no reason for your web browser to use a separate spell-checking system from your email program, or anything else. Pity it's so damn slow at rendering complex pages.
Newer versions of Konqueror also have adblock built in, not as an extension but as part of the browser itself. It's trivial to load up Filterset.G and have a browsing experience that's similar to what you'd have with Firefox. Although I admit, it's not quite as easy to block additional images or servers or temporarily disable blocking as with other systems -- there's definitely room for improvement here. And for Flashblocking, you have to go into the preferences and disable it. (Actually I think both Firefox and Konqueror would do well to look at the shareware PithHelmet for Safari, which even offers some additional features I've yet to see elsewhere.)
Both browsers have things that they could definitely learn from each other, and I'm not sure either one is clearly superior. However, I think that in terms of a cohesive user experience particularly for online forum use, recent versions of Konqueror win out.
and when/if we will finally have such powerful AI, the stock exchange will be our last concern.
I agreed with you right up until this point. I think that when we do get an AI that powerful, the very first thing anyone will do with it, is put it to work gaming the stock market. Maybe after that, someone will try asking it for the cure for cancer or how to bring about world peace. But I'm pretty sure that "what's the next Yahoo?" will be first.
In a similar vein, I'm pretty sure if anyone ever builds a device to see into the future, Priority Number 1 will be to get the next week's PowerBall numbers.
Must have been a bad link. I think that's the page for the Uncertainty Theorem.
Actually, you can make a water-powered car in your own garage. You'll need a lot of water, though, and you'll constantly need to move the water from the bottom to the top of the engine.
Not if it's a very small car, and you only drive when it's raining.
Um, I think you need to read up on your Newton's Law of Cooling again.
If we increase the flow of heat into a body, then its temperature will increase. The rate at which it loses heat to the environment is proportional to the difference between the body and the environment, so it will eventually reach a new equilibrium temperature -- the temperature of the body, in other words, will never just continue to increase up and up.
However, the equilibrium temperature of the body WILL increase. This is pretty simple when you think about it. If you have a fish tank, and you have a 10W heater in it, and it stays constant at 80 degrees (meaning that heat in equals heat out), and then you put a second 10W heater in the tank, the temperature is not going to remain the same. The temperature is going to go up until the heat loss into the environment is the same as the input, and then it will remain in that state.
So any vast new source of energy (and I really mean vast) could potentially cause global warming, by increasing the equilibrium temperature of the Earth as a system, so that it radiates heat into space at the same rate it's being introduced into the system.
That said, I'm not sure that human beings will have it in our power to introduce enough power to the system so that the equilibrium temperature increases significantly. I think it would have to be a fair fraction of the power coming in from the sun and being produced by geologic activity, many thousands or millions of times our current power consumption. And it would all have to come from non-renewable ("new energy") sources. I think the risks of biosphere damage that would make the planet uninhabitable via other means are a bigger risk than just raising the temperature by pumping energy into it. There are many ways to kill ourselves that would require a lot less work.
No, but I might respect him/them more a scientist/group of scientists.
Right now I trust that they're excellent businessmen. However, that gives me absolutely zero faith in their technology, which is what they're basically asking for.
When he mentioned 'vacuum energy' I thought it was like some kind of great big vacuum chamber and when you let the air back in, it turns a wind turbine.
Well, your "vacuum energy" would actually work....
If it's true, someone will patent it and it won't be free - on the contrary, it will still somehow cost me as much as energy does now, as greed seems to outpace progress these days.
t m#i486
Right; because damned if human greed hasn't kept the price of those computer chips right up where they always have been, $60 per 1000 transistors [1], keeping all the profits for themselves. Corporate bastards.
[1] Intel 8080 retailed for around $360 IIRC and had 6,000 transistors. http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.h
I'm not sure the point is relevant here.
You can't make troops more committed to the battle by taking away amenities; all that's going to do is make them less committed, less trusting of their command structure, and less eager to risk their lives. It's the "we'll stop beating you when morale improves" school of leadership, and it only works when you're trying to get people to do mindless manual labor, under close supervision. In short, you can't make good soldiers through force or coercion.
A more general form of your (and Kurtz's) point is that the motivation which drives a force is supremely important in warfare, and there is a certain question in my mind today as to what that motivation is supposed to be, for our troops. It's not exactly clear what the purpose of the war was or is, and frankly I don't think that many Americans can get all that wound up over bringing democracy to a bunch of people who aren't that interested anyway. I think that if you really asked the right questions, you'd probably figure out that most soldiers' motivation is a lot less big-picture and a lot more personal; they're in Iraq because they're career military and want the combat time, or because they want the respect that it'll garner them back home, or just because they thought it would be more interesting than whatever job they would have been doing Stateside. Maybe they think it gives them some personal insight. Everyone has his or her own.
You'd do better to try and find what actually does drive our troops, and encourage that, rather than trying to create a motivation out of fear and misery where there really isn't one now. Where Kurtz was wrong was in likening U.S. troops to Charlie too closely: you can't motivate them in the same way to fight, because they're each there for such totally different reasons, the same things won't work.
It's not like any other large nations (or the companies that run them) would withhold life saving treatments from those in need of them to gain economic advantages....
What, this surprises you? Human life has always been cheap when it comes to the scale of nations. People have empathy for each other; I've yet to see anything that demonstrates such feelings from abstract legal constructs.
If the situation ever came down to one of actual perceived cultural survival, I have no doubt that all the feel-good welfare states of the Western hemisphere would be sending out smallpox-laced blankets to the teeming masses of the Third World, if they thought that would somehow increase their own chances for survival; not only as individuals, but as a coherent civilization.
People as individuals are capable of surprising ruthlessness when threatened, and groups of people (where individuals can spread responsibility for decisions among the group) even more so.
The machine I bought from Retrobox (HP xw5000, which aside from doubling as a space heater, I highly recommend) does not have a Windows sticker on it. It has a suspiciously sticky place on the top-left corner of the right side of the chassis, where one might have been at some point affixed, but it's been removed.
The machines come without any Windows license at all, and they're pretty up-front about this.
Whether this is to protect the identity of the companies that they came from, or have something to do with letting the companies retain and reuse the licenses (can they do that?), I have no idea. But the machines definitely come without one, although RetroBox will happily sell you a retail copy of WinXP and install it for you, if you'd like. I opted not.
My band is unsigned...iTunes is a potential cash cow for forward-thinking bands.
... I don't understand the allure.
I think you just answered your own question. The problem here is that too many artists are lured into thinking that the only way to make a living in music is to sign away your soul to record label, for pennies on the dollar.
Now I'll grant you that I don't really know much about the intricacies of the music business, but based on conversations I've had with quite a few people lately, it seems like an artist would perhaps be better served staying unsigned -- if they have any management skills at all, or know where to find someone who does -- than to get on board with a label. What does the label give you? A chance at a very, very small slice of a larger "pie," but really what's the advantage of that over having a much larger slice of a smaller pie?
If you get 91% back from your music sales, it doesn't take nearly as many sales for you to make a living than it does for a signed band. I'd bet that properly done, the margins on CD sales are similarly large. Sure, you probably won't see an unsigned band's stuff in WalMart, but again: if you can make the same amount of money being a regional band, and have total creative control
The one thing that the labels still seem to have is a pretty tight grip on the music flowing into radio stations, particularly the corporate controlled (*cough*ClearChannel*cough*) ones; but the relevance of that mode of distribution is fading daily. Particularly if your audience is in a younger demographic, it doesn't seem like radio play is necessarily the requirement for sales that it once was.
I guess maybe I'm not a musician and I don't understand the desire for fame that might lead someone to believe that being nationally recognized is a good thing per se, versus making the same amount of money as a regional band, and not feeling like they're taking it up the ass every day. If someone can explain what the value proposition of the record labels is, in today's economy, where it's widely known that they compensate artists poorly and essentially do nothing but take your music as payment for questionable PR campaigns, I'd be interested.
That's what Pentium 4s or PPC970s (your choice) are for.
Me personally, I have a dual-proc PPC970-based system and a P4-based Linux workstation. It gets cold in the winter.
Yeah but who watches their TV for 24 hours a day? That's kind of a ridiculous comparison.
Particularly since most people I know who have projectors, don't use it as their only viewing device. You keep whatever analog TV you're currently using around for casual ("background noise") viewing, and only run the PJ when you want to sit down and seriously watch that game/movie/etc.
I'd guess that most people who own a projector probably use it on the order of a few hours a day or less, meaning that the bulb costs get amortized over a long period. The TCO is very good -- the downsides to a projector really have to do with the screen, space, and mounting requirements, and lighting (need a dark room). Cost-wise, they're by far the cheapest way to get big-screen, high-quality HD.
Damn -- and I really thought I was going to get that new shortwave WiFi setup that I wanted, too.