I am pro fusion, but not a fusion pro. I am confused why such reactive metals must be used for the jacket, Tin and Lead have low melting temperatures, even lower if mixed as an alloy. Not sure how reactive Gallium is, or whether Mercury would had a high enough boiling point, but there are dozens of metals, potentially infinite alloys, what huge advantage does sodium and lithium have for this proposed use? Also, do Lithium and Sodium have large magnetic properties, or do all metals react to a strong enough magnetic field? Yes I know most metals are nowhere near as magnetic as iron and nickel, but are there any completely magnetically inert? Does the liquid jacket have to be a metal? While the plasma is very hot, what will be the surface temperature of the surrounding jacket? It is my understanding that the magnetic confinement should confine most of the extreme heat, with the liquid jacket extracting thermal energy at a controlled rate for use.
I was pro nuclear before 911, but now I don't think we live in a secure enough world, regardless of if the reactor designs are safe in and of themselves. It was unthinkable that anyone would deliberately contaminate large areas with radiation (short of a nuclear war) on purpose before. Now, not so.
I'm a bit late to this topic, so I probably won't get a very good mod, but here goes anyway.
According the Buzz Adrian's "The Return", (a work a fiction, but I'm pretty sure he got the science right) the moon has a stable "Halo" orbit, which is an orbit about a gravitational balance point just beyond the moon opposite Earth (I don't know if this a Langerain point or not). Its properties are such that you can orbit it, just as if it were any other mass. Thus you could orbit this point with full view of the dark side of the moon, and broadcast back to earth from a point that appears to just circle the horizon of the moon. So only one satellite is needed. In fact you could just put the radar antenna at the center of the point and have reasonable shielding I'm without having to enter the moon's gravity well.
As for weight, this thing could be made of aluminum foil; thinner than kitchen variety, since almost all the weight of Radar Dishes on earth are to resist weather and wind, of which there are none on the moon. In fact you wouldn't have to have a perfect dish, just take square chunks of foil (of whatever is the ideal metal), and plant them along a crater wall. The pattern can be sparse, but has it fills up; the signal will of course get better. Something not much more sophisticated than Sojourner could haul the plates into place. Wouldn't matter if it takes a long time (astronomers are nothing if not patient), wouldn't need advanced robotics, the moon is close enough that these is just over 1 second delay time round trip for light, so remote control is good enough to control the construction robots.
Now we have something like Arecibo, with a spherical antenna array. The receiver would have to be suspended over the crater, and elevated. This would be the hardest part, but of course 1/6 g makes it much more doable, plus, once again, it doesn't have to battle the elements, so it doesn't have to be over engineered.
This project needn't be massively expensive due to weight of materials needed. It needn't be massively expensive if NASA could adopt a build-it/design-it as you go along philosophy (with the exception of the receiver portion). Unlike like smaller-faster-cheaper, this would be, "figure it out as we go along". Here is a project, where the ground controllers would really feel like they are part of the action. Lessons learned here would come in handy for doing other more ambitious construction projects in the future. Other projects to date have not had the luxury of experimentation, and had to rely on over engineering and expenses to ensure success.
I read the article and have two opposing thoughts,
1. There have been other vertical turbine wind projects that have failed, one here in my hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois I believe.
2. They only mention the greenhouse portion of the structure in relation to feeding the airflow. Could this be used as a greenhouse for growing produce also? Will it supply its own water from condensation in an arid region. Certainly this would be as nearly a big plus as the energy provided.
1. I understand this was not the main thrust of your posting.
2. When you throw off statements like
Is it really worth destroying generations of birds and their offspring to save five lives?
you have to expect to be challenged. What number of human lives would you value against this (hypothetical) toll?
3. Malpractice deaths is in this context are a red herring. So what if more lives are lost by other means? This doesn't diminish the need to fight mosquito born illness.
4. If the spraying done, poisoned the environment to the degree, or contributed to in the long run, a situation with similar numbers of humans dying, I would be against it.
5. It isn't all about money in this case. The CDC has nightmares about the outbreak of communicable diseases in crowded urban environments. There is no guarantee West Nile couldn't become more virulent in the future.
6. The tone of your original posting, while not explicitly stating a preference for animal life over human life, doesn't deny one. You may not be a Gia-Psuedo-Religion zealot, but they exist, and they would rather see humans die, rather than risk hypothetical long-term damage to the environment, which in their eyes, we pitiful humans are not worthy of occupying.
7. Believe it or not people in organizations like the CDC have a lot of input about the cost/benefit ratios in terms of human lives and risk. People may scream about a ruined picnic because of a spraying, but this is nothing compared to public outrage that would occur if a preventable epidemic took off.
If you would prefer comments more relevant to your over all posting:
Comparing the mess of Intellectual Property Law to environmentalism in the wake of Silent Spring is tenuous at best. Sure the lawyers and people with money have made a mess of things, but hackers, crackers, pirates, virus posters, and various other net inhabiting vermin are not blameless. Perhaps the corporations would be less heavy handed if there really weren't people out there trying to steal their cheese.
Unlike the environmentalism movement, the anti-corporation techno types, are not all, altruistic-good-guys. In this case everybody's motives are suspect. I have heard techno types proudly declare how they are going to "Free" information and "Free" entertainment. If techno types have their way, all that will exist is poor quality amateur content for everything, because it will never pay to create content.
How a someone who clearly doesn't see human life as more valued and cherished than bird life got moderated to a 5, I can't fathom.
With spraying there have been only 5 deaths (so far). How many deaths would be acceptable before we can spray???
I am for protecting the environment only in so much as we live in it. If killing off every bird as a side effect in New Jersey would save even one human life, I would be for it, but these spraying programs don't even come close to having that kind of impact. Protecting animal life is a noble cause, only when it does not interfere with protecting Human life.
Great conspiracy theory, but since many False SETI signals have been sent to SETI@Home by hackers one can conclude:
1. Since the data can be reverse engineered, it is probably SETI data.
2. It would be STUPID to entrust some critical national security calculations to something that can be hacked or spoofed so easily (even if they didn't know what they were hacking on)
Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" should be on this list, especially in light of this week's therapeutic cloning of a human being.
Ironically science fiction is not so much about inventing new science, but rather predicting the consequences of extrapolating what comes about from predictable developments. Many dystopian worlds may have been prevented because someone thought through the consequences and penned them as science fiction novels -- Soylant Green comes to mind.
Science Fiction's main effect is on how we use technology, and in many cases what we name technological items. The experimental Shuttle that never made it to orbit was named the "Enterprise" in homage to Star Trek's vessel of the same name.
What are you 10 years old? I remember when 10 cent sodas were the norm. Then they were 15 cents for a long time. They zoomed past 25 to 50 pretty quick however.:-)
It is now close to midnight, about 15 hours past the crash of flight 587, and I have flip flopped a few times in my opinion as to the probable cause. When I saw the images this morning I thought terrorist attack, later they indicated no terrorist evidence, and I leaned toward accident. Sometime before noon, CNN indicated a credible report of an explosion, I was back to thinking terrorist. An hour after that, the credible report disappears and the rest of the day evidence piles in indicating accident -- I briefly swing back to thinking accident. By about 3pm I change my mind again, this time not because there is any new evidence, and I am ready to log my prediction - terrorist action.
I saw slashdot.org's posting when it only had 20 entries, but had nothing new to add. Now it has over a thousand postings, and there is little chance I will be read by anyone but the most dedicated or zealous of terrorist news followers. Still I am going to record my thoughts, mostly for potential told-you-so value.
Planes do crash accidentally, but there is a near coincident of date, and a coincidence of location to consider. Any plane crashing in the US is going to initially be under suspicion of terrorist activity, but President Bush has taken to attach significance to the date of 11-11-01 as the 2 month Anniversary of 9-11. 11-12-01 has significance as Veteran's Day, and as the closest weekday to 11-11-01. Add to this New York as the location, and I swing back to terrorist activity as the probable cause.
Yes this is all circumstantial evidence, but to be honest, I like many other Americans have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and even if this is terrorist activity, it is mild compared to what has been threatened. With what has been learned about sloppy airport security, I'm surprised there have not been more airline incidents in the last two months.
While we are more carefully screening carry-on baggage, I am of the impression we are not screening all checked baggage. It might also be that we mix freight cargo with passenger cargo (maybe some well-informed person could tell us if this is true of not), thus an altimetrically triggered bomb could bring down an airplane with only having been air freighted by someone.
I'm not sure why there seems to be so much effort exerted to push the accident theory for flight 587. It may well be an accident, but it seems like the news media are pushing to have the public believe accident "until proven otherwise" (I suppose to prevent panic). Personally, I think we should assume "terrorist incident" until proven otherwise. Because the latter will lead to a tightening of security that might prevent another downed planed in the near term.
My old Amiga had decent text to speech processing in 1984.
With all the horsepower available in any modern handheld device -- surely much more than an 8mhz 68000 with 512K of memory (of which only a fraction was used I'm sure) -- I don't understand why a dedicated chip would be needed to pull this off.
I like dialog, and this person has a right to express his feelings, though I seriously doubt his comments merit a mod 4 Insightful. Assertion one, we are surprised that we are hated because we don't pay enough attention to other cultures, point of views, etc. Isolated and by itself, there is not much to argue with, but there are two further assertions; if we understood these feelings we wouldn't do things that bring us harm, or we wouldn't respond with bombs.
What I have come to understand about this culture that hates us, is that virtually nothing we do on the good side of the ledger will matter to them, and they will only ever tally grievances. To understand their point of view will only help avoid conflict with them if we accede to all their demands. This is not because they are Muslim, but because they are in an area of the world where dialogs like we are having here are not possible, so lets no pretend we can just present our case to their populace in a calm fashion.
We have made bad decision supporting regimes that have not moved these societies to more open ones like our own. Yes I am a cultural snob. Western society provides the goods, both in material wealth and personal freedom. Trying to understand the views of those that don't live under such a system, is very much like trying to read an ancient text without a Roseta Stone.
I believe that understanding why Radical Islamic Extremists hate us will not save us from conflict. I do not mean to imply that being ignorant about other cultures is good, or that less knowledge is desired, just that in this case, a supposed lack of familiarity with Islamic grievances on the part of the general public is not why we were attacked. It should also not prevent us from responding in kind.
I responded vitriolically to this individual, because they assume a place of moral and intellectual superiority, and offer a "nutshell" solution that I don't believe is relevant in this case.
Despite the hype of the Nano community, big progress is not "just around the corner", this fret and worry is premature. Worse yet, the article exploits the tragedy of 9-11 to sensationalize its subject matter. The basic premise, others will develop these Nano based weapons if we don't.
They don't mention the Gray-Goo scenario (not achievable anytime soon anyway), but then again, their thesis is not that nano-weapons are uncontrollable, it is that we must have them first.
When it comes to staying ahead in high tech, trust our open society to produce the best results first. If we should ever make big progress, then we need to take steps to keep the technology from falling into the wrong hands. Till then, this is a bunch of useless hysteria, not so subtly trying to get more funds allocated for nano-research, which as they have defined it, is rather broad and vague. Also troubling is the implication, if it is small, maybe it needs oversight and control, again to keep it out of the hands of the bad guys
Don't get me wrong, I'm no Ludite. Nano will be very important in the long run, but there are hundreds of more immediate high tech worries to take care of first. My prediction, machine-intelligence, and machine-human hybridizing will be more immediate impact and concern than weaponizable nano technology , and these technologies are still 30-50 years away themselves.
Given the slow progress of true nano technology, that is producing true Drexler like molecular components and assemblers, the nano marketing people have decided any coating or feature dimension if measured in nano meters, defines nano technology, and thus can claim big breakthroughs are happening today. If you can't produce the results, redefine what success is.
I am usually a Microsoft basher, but if the XP OS is more stable, the theoretical performance difference will not matter, since it will more than be made up for by not loosing work, rebooting, etc... Faster processors will fix any performance difference in less than 6 months. No processor fix is possible to prevent the Blue Screen of Death.
It seems to me everyone who has an agenda to promote, starts by informing us that we are ignorant. If only we had read, studied or investigated more of the right kind of material -- as they see it -- then everything would be magically better.
This person seems to imply they are not like Joe Average Citizen, so they must know the reasons we are hated, and yet they haven't list one reason (to help educate us hapless Joes). I have listened to many talking heads on television of late, most think they are educated in such matters, far more than Joe Average Citizen, and yet they are unable to come up with a consensus on why we are hated.
If Americas policies in the world were somehow perfect as viewed by an omnipotent, unbiased, observer, I believe we would still be hated -- maybe by different groups, but still hated. The idea that if we just knew everyone on the planet better, our love and understanding would extinguish their hatred is a bunch of crap, some kind of quasi religious belief.
Lets stop with the self hatred, dealing with the external hatred is hard enough. All these supposedly mightyly wronged other peoples of the world, what kind of world do you think would exist if they had the power we have? Think they would be as restrained? Think they would wallow in self hate? Think they would be issuing constant apologies? Think there would be less hate in the world?
You are a naive, whinny, idealist. That, in a nutshell, is what the problem is.
If it had been my unit, and not my 70 year old father's who thinks this is how DVD's are supppose to behave, I would have returned it. I will get the exact model number the next time I am home. It works similar to many software codecs I saw on early DVD enabled computers, so I have no basis to think it is broken, since it works somewhat better than most of those early ones.
Maybe not every NUON player made, is made as poorly as my Father's, but get real, these things will never have any broad penetration past playing regular DVDs, and I have every reason to believe, some units got chintzy on MPEG decompression, assuming software and NUON could make up the difference for some dedicated firmware most other DVDs have.
BTW, and as an aside, have you ever tried explaining to someone over 70, why the Play button on a DVD won't start Playing the DVD, and you have to push Select first??? The screen says Play, the button says play (but of course it won't). If you want to call someone a moron, how about the person that didn't think this through on a DVD interface.
Forgive the reply to my own reply, but this answers most threads posted to the first reply.
I have never had a crash on my PS2 and I was a first day (US) buyer. I don't spend a lot of time gaming however (I mostly wanted to have it, to have it).
I have never seen a crash or hang in a store, but once again, I haven't spent hours haning out in mall electronic stores.
That all said, Sony had lead time by releasing in Japan first to shake out many bugs. Microsoft will have virtually no time to fix any perceived problem while the Holiday season is in full swing.
Rightly or wrongly, the general public associates crashing with Windows. Any above average occurance of crashes will doom this product, and be a black eye for Microsoft.
For X-Box Fans, cross your fingers and hope it's the heat.
If early generation games crash, Microsoft will have a perception problem regardless of who is at fault. The bar is set higher for entry machines these days. PlayStation and PlayStation II were not prone to crashing. No doubt Microsoft will try to shift blame to developers, but I doubt that tactic will work this time. I see a real debacle in the making, so severe in fact, that a last minute shipment slip could occur (to be blamed on 9-11 no doubt).
My father has a nuon enhanced DVD player (which I tried advising him not to get).
It is a piece of crap, that takes forever to start up movies, and has a tendency to stall for seconds at a time between tracks (like its catching up on some computations of some sort).
Now they want to release enhanced-nuon-boxes, so buying the original nuon is even more of a joke.
This thing has been out for 2 or so years now, and it has less than 10 titles for it. Shut up and sit down, this thing is dead.
Yes, yes, yes, by all means, lets all stop everything, anyone in this country does for entertainment or recreation. Lets do nothing but think non-stop about the tragedy! Lets do this for years! In fact, let's sit on little mats, rocking back in forth, while we plead God to tell us why this has all happened.
I only meant failure, in the sense that they were never adopted as mainstream languages. Many contain worthy concepts, and of course many are just whimsical.
Hopefully one day, one of these things will have the promised impact on computing, but like many promised breakthroughs, this report leaves many details vague.
molecular-scale transistors that rival conventional silicon transistors in performance
And rival here means what? Slower, but will become faster; Slower, but less power? Aren't we aiming for superior in all facets, not just size?
factor of ten smaller...
A Million Times Smaller Than a Grain of Sand
In what dimensions? Width, Area, Volume? What are the actual dimensions, and not just the molecule switch, but the whole gate arrangement?
A good switch perhaps, but it looks as though it is still hooked up to conventional circuitry, unless I'm reading there diagram incorrectly. This isn't so much nano-technology, as a nano-coating on existing technology. Self assembly doesn't impress me in a coating.
Self-assemble the paths in and out of the circuit and then we'll talk.
Slashdot Mirror
I am pro fusion, but not a fusion pro. I am confused why such reactive metals must be used for the jacket, Tin and Lead have low melting temperatures, even lower if mixed as an alloy. Not sure how reactive Gallium is, or whether Mercury would had a high enough boiling point, but there are dozens of metals, potentially infinite alloys, what huge advantage does sodium and lithium have for this proposed use? Also, do Lithium and Sodium have large magnetic properties, or do all metals react to a strong enough magnetic field? Yes I know most metals are nowhere near as magnetic as iron and nickel, but are there any completely magnetically inert? Does the liquid jacket have to be a metal? While the plasma is very hot, what will be the surface temperature of the surrounding jacket? It is my understanding that the magnetic confinement should confine most of the extreme heat, with the liquid jacket extracting thermal energy at a controlled rate for use.
I was pro nuclear before 911, but now I don't think we live in a secure enough world, regardless of if the reactor designs are safe in and of themselves. It was unthinkable that anyone would deliberately contaminate large areas with radiation (short of a nuclear war) on purpose before. Now, not so.
According the Buzz Adrian's "The Return", (a work a fiction, but I'm pretty sure he got the science right) the moon has a stable "Halo" orbit, which is an orbit about a gravitational balance point just beyond the moon opposite Earth (I don't know if this a Langerain point or not). Its properties are such that you can orbit it, just as if it were any other mass. Thus you could orbit this point with full view of the dark side of the moon, and broadcast back to earth from a point that appears to just circle the horizon of the moon. So only one satellite is needed. In fact you could just put the radar antenna at the center of the point and have reasonable shielding I'm without having to enter the moon's gravity well.
As for weight, this thing could be made of aluminum foil; thinner than kitchen variety, since almost all the weight of Radar Dishes on earth are to resist weather and wind, of which there are none on the moon. In fact you wouldn't have to have a perfect dish, just take square chunks of foil (of whatever is the ideal metal), and plant them along a crater wall. The pattern can be sparse, but has it fills up; the signal will of course get better. Something not much more sophisticated than Sojourner could haul the plates into place. Wouldn't matter if it takes a long time (astronomers are nothing if not patient), wouldn't need advanced robotics, the moon is close enough that these is just over 1 second delay time round trip for light, so remote control is good enough to control the construction robots.
Now we have something like Arecibo, with a spherical antenna array. The receiver would have to be suspended over the crater, and elevated. This would be the hardest part, but of course 1/6 g makes it much more doable, plus, once again, it doesn't have to battle the elements, so it doesn't have to be over engineered.
This project needn't be massively expensive due to weight of materials needed. It needn't be massively expensive if NASA could adopt a build-it/design-it as you go along philosophy (with the exception of the receiver portion). Unlike like smaller-faster-cheaper, this would be, "figure it out as we go along". Here is a project, where the ground controllers would really feel like they are part of the action. Lessons learned here would come in handy for doing other more ambitious construction projects in the future. Other projects to date have not had the luxury of experimentation, and had to rely on over engineering and expenses to ensure success.
1. There have been other vertical turbine wind projects that have failed, one here in my hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois I believe.
2. They only mention the greenhouse portion of the structure in relation to feeding the airflow. Could this be used as a greenhouse for growing produce also? Will it supply its own water from condensation in an arid region. Certainly this would be as nearly a big plus as the energy provided.
2. When you throw off statements like
Is it really worth destroying generations of birds and their offspring to save five lives?
you have to expect to be challenged. What number of human lives would you value against this (hypothetical) toll?
3. Malpractice deaths is in this context are a red herring. So what if more lives are lost by other means? This doesn't diminish the need to fight mosquito born illness.
4. If the spraying done, poisoned the environment to the degree, or contributed to in the long run, a situation with similar numbers of humans dying, I would be against it.
5. It isn't all about money in this case. The CDC has nightmares about the outbreak of communicable diseases in crowded urban environments. There is no guarantee West Nile couldn't become more virulent in the future.
6. The tone of your original posting, while not explicitly stating a preference for animal life over human life, doesn't deny one. You may not be a Gia-Psuedo-Religion zealot, but they exist, and they would rather see humans die, rather than risk hypothetical long-term damage to the environment, which in their eyes, we pitiful humans are not worthy of occupying.
7. Believe it or not people in organizations like the CDC have a lot of input about the cost/benefit ratios in terms of human lives and risk. People may scream about a ruined picnic because of a spraying, but this is nothing compared to public outrage that would occur if a preventable epidemic took off.
If you would prefer comments more relevant to your over all posting:
Comparing the mess of Intellectual Property Law to environmentalism in the wake of Silent Spring is tenuous at best. Sure the lawyers and people with money have made a mess of things, but hackers, crackers, pirates, virus posters, and various other net inhabiting vermin are not blameless. Perhaps the corporations would be less heavy handed if there really weren't people out there trying to steal their cheese.
Unlike the environmentalism movement, the anti-corporation techno types, are not all, altruistic-good-guys. In this case everybody's motives are suspect. I have heard techno types proudly declare how they are going to "Free" information and "Free" entertainment. If techno types have their way, all that will exist is poor quality amateur content for everything, because it will never pay to create content.
With spraying there have been only 5 deaths (so far). How many deaths would be acceptable before we can spray???
I am for protecting the environment only in so much as we live in it. If killing off every bird as a side effect in New Jersey would save even one human life, I would be for it, but these spraying programs don't even come close to having that kind of impact. Protecting animal life is a noble cause, only when it does not interfere with protecting Human life.
Great conspiracy theory, but since many False SETI signals have been sent to SETI@Home by hackers one can conclude:
1. Since the data can be reverse engineered, it is probably SETI data.
2. It would be STUPID to entrust some critical national security calculations to something that can be hacked or spoofed so easily (even if they didn't know what they were hacking on)
Ironically science fiction is not so much about inventing new science, but rather predicting the consequences of extrapolating what comes about from predictable developments. Many dystopian worlds may have been prevented because someone thought through the consequences and penned them as science fiction novels -- Soylant Green comes to mind.
Science Fiction's main effect is on how we use technology, and in many cases what we name technological items. The experimental Shuttle that never made it to orbit was named the "Enterprise" in homage to Star Trek's vessel of the same name.
What are you 10 years old? I remember when 10 cent sodas were the norm. Then they were 15 cents for a long time. They zoomed past 25 to 50 pretty quick however. :-)
I was trying to be kind with a 30-50 year time frame. The other extreme "NEVER", is equally unlikely.
I saw slashdot.org's posting when it only had 20 entries, but had nothing new to add. Now it has over a thousand postings, and there is little chance I will be read by anyone but the most dedicated or zealous of terrorist news followers. Still I am going to record my thoughts, mostly for potential told-you-so value.
Planes do crash accidentally, but there is a near coincident of date, and a coincidence of location to consider. Any plane crashing in the US is going to initially be under suspicion of terrorist activity, but President Bush has taken to attach significance to the date of 11-11-01 as the 2 month Anniversary of 9-11. 11-12-01 has significance as Veteran's Day, and as the closest weekday to 11-11-01. Add to this New York as the location, and I swing back to terrorist activity as the probable cause.
Yes this is all circumstantial evidence, but to be honest, I like many other Americans have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and even if this is terrorist activity, it is mild compared to what has been threatened. With what has been learned about sloppy airport security, I'm surprised there have not been more airline incidents in the last two months.
While we are more carefully screening carry-on baggage, I am of the impression we are not screening all checked baggage. It might also be that we mix freight cargo with passenger cargo (maybe some well-informed person could tell us if this is true of not), thus an altimetrically triggered bomb could bring down an airplane with only having been air freighted by someone.
I'm not sure why there seems to be so much effort exerted to push the accident theory for flight 587. It may well be an accident, but it seems like the news media are pushing to have the public believe accident "until proven otherwise" (I suppose to prevent panic). Personally, I think we should assume "terrorist incident" until proven otherwise. Because the latter will lead to a tightening of security that might prevent another downed planed in the near term.
Sorry, I was off my 2 years.
With all the horsepower available in any modern handheld device -- surely much more than an 8mhz 68000 with 512K of memory (of which only a fraction was used I'm sure) -- I don't understand why a dedicated chip would be needed to pull this off.
What I have come to understand about this culture that hates us, is that virtually nothing we do on the good side of the ledger will matter to them, and they will only ever tally grievances. To understand their point of view will only help avoid conflict with them if we accede to all their demands. This is not because they are Muslim, but because they are in an area of the world where dialogs like we are having here are not possible, so lets no pretend we can just present our case to their populace in a calm fashion.
We have made bad decision supporting regimes that have not moved these societies to more open ones like our own. Yes I am a cultural snob. Western society provides the goods, both in material wealth and personal freedom. Trying to understand the views of those that don't live under such a system, is very much like trying to read an ancient text without a Roseta Stone.
I believe that understanding why Radical Islamic Extremists hate us will not save us from conflict. I do not mean to imply that being ignorant about other cultures is good, or that less knowledge is desired, just that in this case, a supposed lack of familiarity with Islamic grievances on the part of the general public is not why we were attacked. It should also not prevent us from responding in kind.
I responded vitriolically to this individual, because they assume a place of moral and intellectual superiority, and offer a "nutshell" solution that I don't believe is relevant in this case.
They don't mention the Gray-Goo scenario (not achievable anytime soon anyway), but then again, their thesis is not that nano-weapons are uncontrollable, it is that we must have them first.
When it comes to staying ahead in high tech, trust our open society to produce the best results first. If we should ever make big progress, then we need to take steps to keep the technology from falling into the wrong hands. Till then, this is a bunch of useless hysteria, not so subtly trying to get more funds allocated for nano-research, which as they have defined it, is rather broad and vague. Also troubling is the implication, if it is small, maybe it needs oversight and control, again to keep it out of the hands of the bad guys
Don't get me wrong, I'm no Ludite. Nano will be very important in the long run, but there are hundreds of more immediate high tech worries to take care of first. My prediction, machine-intelligence, and machine-human hybridizing will be more immediate impact and concern than weaponizable nano technology , and these technologies are still 30-50 years away themselves.
Given the slow progress of true nano technology, that is producing true Drexler like molecular components and assemblers, the nano marketing people have decided any coating or feature dimension if measured in nano meters, defines nano technology, and thus can claim big breakthroughs are happening today. If you can't produce the results, redefine what success is.
I am usually a Microsoft basher, but if the XP OS is more stable, the theoretical performance difference will not matter, since it will more than be made up for by not loosing work, rebooting, etc... Faster processors will fix any performance difference in less than 6 months. No processor fix is possible to prevent the Blue Screen of Death.
This person seems to imply they are not like Joe Average Citizen, so they must know the reasons we are hated, and yet they haven't list one reason (to help educate us hapless Joes). I have listened to many talking heads on television of late, most think they are educated in such matters, far more than Joe Average Citizen, and yet they are unable to come up with a consensus on why we are hated.
If Americas policies in the world were somehow perfect as viewed by an omnipotent, unbiased, observer, I believe we would still be hated -- maybe by different groups, but still hated. The idea that if we just knew everyone on the planet better, our love and understanding would extinguish their hatred is a bunch of crap, some kind of quasi religious belief.
Lets stop with the self hatred, dealing with the external hatred is hard enough. All these supposedly mightyly wronged other peoples of the world, what kind of world do you think would exist if they had the power we have? Think they would be as restrained? Think they would wallow in self hate? Think they would be issuing constant apologies? Think there would be less hate in the world?
You are a naive, whinny, idealist. That, in a nutshell, is what the problem is.
If it had been my unit, and not my 70 year old father's who thinks this is how DVD's are supppose to behave, I would have returned it. I will get the exact model number the next time I am home. It works similar to many software codecs I saw on early DVD enabled computers, so I have no basis to think it is broken, since it works somewhat better than most of those early ones.
Maybe not every NUON player made, is made as poorly as my Father's, but get real, these things will never have any broad penetration past playing regular DVDs, and I have every reason to believe, some units got chintzy on MPEG decompression, assuming software and NUON could make up the difference for some dedicated firmware most other DVDs have.
BTW, and as an aside, have you ever tried explaining to someone over 70, why the Play button on a DVD won't start Playing the DVD, and you have to push Select first??? The screen says Play, the button says play (but of course it won't). If you want to call someone a moron, how about the person that didn't think this through on a DVD interface.
I have never had a crash on my PS2 and I was a first day (US) buyer. I don't spend a lot of time gaming however (I mostly wanted to have it, to have it).
I have never seen a crash or hang in a store, but once again, I haven't spent hours haning out in mall electronic stores.
That all said, Sony had lead time by releasing in Japan first to shake out many bugs. Microsoft will have virtually no time to fix any perceived problem while the Holiday season is in full swing.
Rightly or wrongly, the general public associates crashing with Windows. Any above average occurance of crashes will doom this product, and be a black eye for Microsoft.
For X-Box Fans, cross your fingers and hope it's the heat.
If early generation games crash, Microsoft will have a perception problem regardless of who is at fault. The bar is set higher for entry machines these days. PlayStation and PlayStation II were not prone to crashing. No doubt Microsoft will try to shift blame to developers, but I doubt that tactic will work this time. I see a real debacle in the making, so severe in fact, that a last minute shipment slip could occur (to be blamed on 9-11 no doubt).
It is a piece of crap, that takes forever to start up movies, and has a tendency to stall for seconds at a time between tracks (like its catching up on some computations of some sort).
Now they want to release enhanced-nuon-boxes, so buying the original nuon is even more of a joke.
This thing has been out for 2 or so years now, and it has less than 10 titles for it. Shut up and sit down, this thing is dead.
That'll show those damned terrorist!
I only meant failure, in the sense that they were never adopted as mainstream languages. Many contain worthy concepts, and of course many are just whimsical.
Judgement withheld until reproduced in other labs.
molecular-scale transistors that rival conventional silicon transistors in performance
And rival here means what? Slower, but will become faster; Slower, but less power? Aren't we aiming for superior in all facets, not just size?
factor of ten smaller...
A Million Times Smaller Than a Grain of Sand
In what dimensions? Width, Area, Volume? What are the actual dimensions, and not just the molecule switch, but the whole gate arrangement?
A good switch perhaps, but it looks as though it is still hooked up to conventional circuitry, unless I'm reading there diagram incorrectly. This isn't so much nano-technology, as a nano-coating on existing technology. Self assembly doesn't impress me in a coating.
Self-assemble the paths in and out of the circuit and then we'll talk.