I'm on a grammar-nazi kinda mood, but I'll be polite =)
Immanent
1. naturally part of something; inherent; integral
Love is immanent in humans.
2. restricted to the mind; subjective
Perhaps you meant to say immediate?
1. happening right away, instantly, with no delay
People these days expect immediate results when they click on a link.
2. Very close; direct or adjacent.
immediate family immediate surroundings
I would argue that the problem is immanent to IPv4, but not immediate just yet. I thought it was funny because immanent is one of my favorite pet words, it's so beautiful;)
I'm all for bashing good ol' US when appropriate but it seems to me GP was referring to issues such as Global Warming vs Deniers. The latter lack any peer-reviewed credible evidence of their position, these days respectable scientific debate is divided between those who believe GW is human-made versus those who don't think so but its existence is pretty much an accepted fact*
Or Evolution vs Intelligent Design. Evolution is a scientific theory susceptible of verification and deniability whereas ID is a proposed explanation but its not a theory: one can't test it so it is not deniable*
*Please note that these are the accepted mainstream scientific positions, that doesn't necessarily make them true, being scientific implies that one be open to be found in error. You are all welcome to disagree with my ideas but please use arguments rather than biting my head off =)
(Still no -1; Wrong though.) And I hope we never get it because we would potentially miss on useful information like the one you provide in your reply. How would a -1 Wrong let me know what is wrong, why, and what would be correct? Only by posting like you did =) This is a discussion forum, not an assessment one. I am NOT trolling I didn't know one is protected and not the other, also I have moderator points but instead of modding you down I decided to practice what I preach. Cheers!
Nah, you did say that was your personal taste which is not accountable to anyone (unless by satisfying it you broke the law). But you went further ahead and offered a comparison of the two games and some other bits of argumentation. That explanation is the part of your opinion that I called wrong. So your argument would really look like
A: I personally prefer white wine to red wine because white wine has ALL the properties that a good beverage should have, its yummy and good for your tummy.
B: You're wrong! white wine would be greatly improved if we could come up with a red one. Red has been shown to be better for you health, it ages much more elegantly and besides red wine just totally rules, you tool!
So, aside from the tool bit which I take back, it would be a valid exchange in a site like/. which is after all, a discussion forum and therefore not only the stories but also the comments are open to discussion. Otherwise it would be a blog and without comments enabled. But I agree with you on the rhetoric issue. And I think the ideal conclusion to this particular discussion would look like:
A: Well, your arguments do not convince me so I stick to my original opinion.
Well, I did use language that was uncalled-for and I apologize for it. Sorry mate, I'll try to keep it more civil! However, even though I did understand your point I was saying that it is wrong, and I presented arguments to show why. I think you can agree that merely having an opinion doesn't make that opinion infallible. I didn't say that your having and opinion was wrong, but that the opinion itself was wrong. In a completely off-topic opinion of my own I think that there is a difference between having the freedom to express a point of view and having that point of view recognized as untouchable and undebatable. Of course I could be wrong;)
Two words: Bull Shit. And then some more: Dual perspective. Make the large units' size scale-accurate and the ability to switch between Macro and Ground Unit scales. Remember the Ghost that never was? Add levels to be played at FPS level. Add Bridge level scale where instead of managing hordes of troops you manage the crew of one Cruise or other big ship to accomplish a particular objective (think Star Wars, "shoot in the exhaust, blow enemy base"). They could add the option to have generals or hero units and pre-program them at the beginning of the level/match with basic strategies so if you don't take any action they would start organizing whatever units you assign to them to follow one of those strategies. So no, you are wrong, there are tons of things that can be added to make it incredible while keeping what made the original cool.
Things are the way they are because that's how we label them.
Ah, semantics yes. My girlfriend always complains that we are arguing about what the words mean rather than the core issue so that in truth we are speaking of two or more different things. All I can say is that better-trained minds than mine have been arguing about it for centuries (not the same minds for all that time but it's late, I haven't slept and you surely get my drift:P). Just for the fun of it think about this: What if language doesn't define the world but the other way around and we label things the way we do because that's the way they are?
I can be wrong, but it's my understanding that generally we observe Phenomenon A1, and either consciously or as a result of a prehistoric grunt, then we give it a name whereby Phenomenon A1 then becomes "rain". We shape the words around the world, because the world is out there a-priori. Which is another statement that has been hotly debated, but whether that world is a shadow of Platonic Ideas, an objective reality or other, we still perceive something on average, and we develop our language around that perception. It may seem otherwise because of the way language is taught to us ("Look! this is An Apple"), but you were referring to the actual existence of things ("Oh, I have observed that Phenomenon A1 takes place. I shall name Phenomenon A1 'rain'"...then to another... "Look! this is Rain"). Words don't have meaning in and of themselves, they are labels we hang onto things. If we change the labels, things remain unchanged.
It sounds like you're already assuming that there's a mind behind it.
I know exactly what you mean. Because that is the point I was making to GP;)
Some people dislike this and they look for explanations in meta(beyond) physics."
They can just as easily say that some people don't like the uncaring universe that science reveals, and that's why they run to religion.
Which is an entirely valid opinion. My point in reply to GP's reference to "crazy religious people" is that science can't speculate on any motivation behind observed phenomena, including whether motive exists at all or not. That's the reason I brought up my hypothetical Maker, to put forth a little mental experiment; is it conceivable that It may have made the rules so that It can tamper with them? Yes, it is. Not very logical, and it doesn't pass Occam's razor, but why would our hypothetical entity —capable of creating the rules— be bound by those rules? Please note that here I'm not advocating for nor against, merely presenting scenarios.
You are falling for the same trap as GP: anthropomorphizing the universe, in your case by ascribing to it the characteristic of "uncaring". I was trying to point out that science can explain how the universe "is", but not "why". "Why" demands intention otherwise it would be randomness, and devoid of intentionality asking "why" is meaningless. But intentionality (even of things human) is a very tricky business for science to disprove, and by my logic, not being able to explain intentions precludes you to give value judgments over the moral characteristics of the universe. Or in English: science can tell you the mechanics of some phenomenon but it is neutral to it and won't help you decide if it is "good", "bad" or "uncaring". That's the realm of Ethics, a discipline of Philosophy.
As of Thu 17, 21:51 Australian East time, the interface is the exact same ugly and boring simple interface from all time from my computer. Where is my eyecandy!?
More significantly: if everything is deterministic based on "physics", could you please tell us where the rules of physics come from, and why they are as they are and not some other way? For instance, why do massive bodies attract and not repel? Why does light travel at the speed it does? At some point there is an arbitrary "decision" as to how things work which cannot be explained by pre-determined rules - unless it's just elephants all the way down...
You were on a roll up to this point. But here you seem to be falling for a different brand of question begging: you are tacitly assuming that there is "a reason" for things to be the way they are. So far the best explanation IMHO is another tautology... Things are the way they are, because that's the way they are.
That's the gripe with science that rational religious people have (and yes, they do exist), science can conceivably tell you how the universe works but can't tell you WHY it works that way. To speculate on the motivation for things to be the way they are is outside of the realm of science. Some people dislike this and they look for explanations in meta(beyond) physics. So basically you have to big trends, either the universe "just happened" or it was somehow made. Science could tell you down to the very last quark how the universe works in either case, it doesn't matter to it whether something put it together like this or it was just a Big Freak Accident as long as there are strings of cause and effect leading from "A" to "B" to "C" and so forth.
Conceivably if the universe was made, and The Maker tweaked it at random here and there —i.e. by performing miracles— that would thwart science's efforts to explain things because it relies on repeatability and pattern-finding. But experience so far tell us that our reality has stable behavior that doesn't change in unpredictable ways. That doesn't rule out the possibility of a maker behind curtains, for all we know s/he/it may be tweaking the world and still staying within its rules. But science won't be able to distinguish intent from random accident because it operates from inside the environment and whether the "rules" were placed or they just sprung from nowhere, they still bind it.
You just described both William Gibson's world and —brace yourself— Second Life! Yes, I know many people here hate the guts of SL, but this is exactly what it tries to be. Whether they achieve it or not is debatable, and there is the matter of it being centralized rather than distributed but that's just the idea behind it.
The only problem I see if the component or HDMI cable will be as big as the phone.
I was thinking more or less the same thing. But one way to solve it would be to have a plug-in adapter that you would use only when you wanted to interface with your HDTV. Or you could connect to it via some wireless adapter. There are disadvantages with this too as you would need to carry the adapter around if you wanted to use it away from home, but if this became ubiquitous maybe the connectors would come built in on the HDTV itself.
Besides, TFA mentions this Diamond Age *shudder* type of interface for stereotypical "3rd world illiterate mothers" [flamebait]because, you know, there are NO illiterates in the slums of big industrialized cities[/flamebait] where everything is done through icons. So the pictures should scale well and be very easily displayed even in good old analog cathode-ray TVs. If you were to do everything with pictograms there is little need for fine-grained resolution, and whatever text you want to display could be done in BIG LETTERS like in movie OSes =)
Damn you! You stole my possibly +1 Informative =)
I agree that its a good movie. But I wonder, other than some nuts like those that spend half their day video-blogging, who would want to record every single waking —and sleeping!— moment? Well, yes, all that indexing and searching possibilities are cool and all, but you would still have to spend some time looking it up, and quite frankly memories get embellished by our minds. Just go back and read your high school angst-ridden writings and if you're matured just a bit you'll most likely find them more tiresome than interesting. Its like when we saw the retouched SW originals, they are not as awesome as we remembered them because we changed and they didn't. And there's the waste in recording again what you already saw (because you would be recording yourself watching those records... bleh). I guess I'm more analog than I thought. And don't get me started on the potential privacy breach nightmares by some random asshat with nothing better to do...
Apparently everyone and their dog use it in Russia. Right before they turned GAIM into Pidgin I installed GAIM 1.5 and logged on to my neglected yahoo and ICQ accounts. My 6 digit ICQ was still working up until this morning, and every single day I get at least 3 Russian girls (or so they claim) wanting to chat, and at least 2 spam messages in Cyrillic trying to get me to click in some shady URL that I wouldn't touch with Firefox barricaded behind the Proxomitron and a Firewall on an unpluged computer powered-off =P
At least one of the alleged Russkys I actually started chatting with is cute. They sure know how to make them in the Ukraine;)
I suspect the reason behind this is that many people don't like the current state of affairs and they go "what, an extra 100 of this crap? No thanks!" which would explain the comments about getting bored. If you had asked me this question at certain points in the past I would probably had asked you to shut up and hand me the gun. Today I would like to live for as long as I was lucid and in good health. I guess it's all about perspective, go figure.
And another problem with that is that We The People like the way we live, whatever it may be, because that's the way we live. We grow attached to our culture and the longer we spend inside it, the harder it is for the majority to view it with a critical eye and weed out its issues. Then throw more people that learn and inherit that culture in the mix, and I think that nothing short of one of those fabled "inflection points" will modify it.
Wow, my first "flamebait":P Totally undeserved if we judge by the responses I got, which by the way were exactly the kind of discussion I wanted to have. Oh well, enough whining. I know that population rates decline on industrialized countries, but they don't hold the bulk of the population anyway. China alone has over a billion people, yes, but India has another and they have no such policy. And neither do many of the developing countries. So unfortunately it just seems like the weight of the population is just going to shift even more towards the places where living standards aren't the greatest, which will make all the more difficult for them to improve their quality of life.
I am of two minds on this. I'd like to enjoy a longer lifespan than I would otherwise expect and I would want my loved ones (and everyone in the world for that matter) to have it too. But if according to the wikipedia we are well over SIX THOUSAND MILLION people alive at the moment, the world would find itself in a much worse position if we stopped dieing and clearing the way for younger generations.
I just moved here (Oz) last year, and I have only one thing to say to you: MOVE!
Now! =) Its just as cool as everybody says it is. But that said, this whole censorship vibe is very real. I got an "R"-rated version of Urotsukidoji (sp?) and it was totally butchered, nearly unwatchable. I'm still mad after three months, and the worst is that you can only get the uncensored original either on ebay or at comic shops that will charge you upwards of $60 AUD. And they put this god-awful HUGE color-coded banners in the front cover of all movies advertising its rating and ruining the art, it's disgusting. And a bunch of whiners got to take down an ad from the tv just last month (too lazy to look it up, but there was a/. story) because it might give toddlers ideas. It seems like the population is polarized between all-out liberalism and conservatives-to-the-bone. Not criticizing but pointing out, like I said I love the place. I have also lived in the US and it's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't raise a family there (been at Seattle, Boston, San Antonio, none worth the hassle. Maybe the countryside but I didn't have the opportunity to try that). Not to say that the US is a hellhole either, but here life is more laid back. Australia has something... or maybe they just put hypnotic drugs in the water;)
I hate you. I was getting all excited, thanks a lot for busting my bubble with your realism =P
I'm reading Blue Mars and the utopian economics they try to set up there seem interesting. I seriously doubt a matter replicator a la StarTrek will ever become a reality —or something like in that boring book with the Lady's Primer nanomagical nonsense whose name eludes me (and while I'm at it I think 300 is dull so mod me into oblivion)—, but having renewable and near-free energy sources such as wind and solar would certainly help a great deal towards making it possible to distribute wealth more evenly.
The biggest barrier to this, IMHO, is western pro-profit capitalist mentality: You must always compete, you must always grow, you must always gain. There is little room for ties or compromises and what might be perceived as a steady-state is instead viewed as stagnation or mediocrity. Some people maintain that we do have the capacity right this day to feed the world, but many issues ranging from distribution problems to plain old greed prevent it. I want to believe that if we could find a better energy source, the cost of living would go down a bit, and the quality of living for many people in extreme poverty might improve. But I could just be naive =(
True, but how big was the original HDD? That's why I was wondering what benefits one might possibly gain that would counterbalance the loss of storage space.
Yeah, I agree on the weight thing. Less weight and better battery life, but speed I'm not so sure. I don't own an iPod but I've used a couple and I didn't think anything about the speed at all which I would propose means it's fast enough as it is, not intrusive or noticeable. After all you play the music in real time, not to chipmunk-time-warp mode. And you seek the songs scrolling with the wheelie thingie (tm), so it's not like you would gain a lot in terms of seek-time.
I'm confused by the summary. It talks about how the article gives details on how to do it, but it's not a 'how to'. Er... huh? But back to topic, I think this is cool as a technical hack but a bit pointless unless for some strange reason you absolutely need the battery life that I suspect is the only gain. Then again, getting to know how to (but not 'how to') swap your HDD might come in handy when those flash-based HDDs come to the market at reasonable prices.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm on a grammar-nazi kinda mood, but I'll be polite =)
Immanent
1. naturally part of something; inherent; integral
Love is immanent in humans.
2. restricted to the mind; subjective
Perhaps you meant to say immediate ?
1. happening right away, instantly, with no delay
People these days expect immediate results when they click on a link.
2. Very close; direct or adjacent.
immediate family
immediate surroundings
I would argue that the problem is immanent to IPv4, but not immediate just yet. I thought it was funny because immanent is one of my favorite pet words, it's so beautiful ;)
I'm all for bashing good ol' US when appropriate but it seems to me GP was referring to issues such as Global Warming vs Deniers. The latter lack any peer-reviewed credible evidence of their position, these days respectable scientific debate is divided between those who believe GW is human-made versus those who don't think so but its existence is pretty much an accepted fact*
Or Evolution vs Intelligent Design. Evolution is a scientific theory susceptible of verification and deniability whereas ID is a proposed explanation but its not a theory: one can't test it so it is not deniable*
*Please note that these are the accepted mainstream scientific positions, that doesn't necessarily make them true, being scientific implies that one be open to be found in error. You are all welcome to disagree with my ideas but please use arguments rather than biting my head off =)
Nah, you did say that was your personal taste which is not accountable to anyone (unless by satisfying it you broke the law). But you went further ahead and offered a comparison of the two games and some other bits of argumentation. That explanation is the part of your opinion that I called wrong. So your argument would really look like
A: I personally prefer white wine to red wine because white wine has ALL the properties that a good beverage should have, its yummy and good for your tummy.
B: You're wrong! white wine would be greatly improved if we could come up with a red one. Red has been shown to be better for you health, it ages much more elegantly and besides red wine just totally rules, you tool!
So, aside from the tool bit which I take back, it would be a valid exchange in a site like /. which is after all, a discussion forum and therefore not only the stories but also the comments are open to discussion. Otherwise it would be a blog and without comments enabled. But I agree with you on the rhetoric issue. And I think the ideal conclusion to this particular discussion would look like:
A: Well, your arguments do not convince me so I stick to my original opinion.
B: Fair enough
Well, I did use language that was uncalled-for and I apologize for it. Sorry mate, I'll try to keep it more civil! However, even though I did understand your point I was saying that it is wrong, and I presented arguments to show why. I think you can agree that merely having an opinion doesn't make that opinion infallible. I didn't say that your having and opinion was wrong, but that the opinion itself was wrong. In a completely off-topic opinion of my own I think that there is a difference between having the freedom to express a point of view and having that point of view recognized as untouchable and undebatable. Of course I could be wrong ;)
Two words: Bull Shit. And then some more: Dual perspective. Make the large units' size scale-accurate and the ability to switch between Macro and Ground Unit scales. Remember the Ghost that never was? Add levels to be played at FPS level. Add Bridge level scale where instead of managing hordes of troops you manage the crew of one Cruise or other big ship to accomplish a particular objective (think Star Wars, "shoot in the exhaust, blow enemy base"). They could add the option to have generals or hero units and pre-program them at the beginning of the level/match with basic strategies so if you don't take any action they would start organizing whatever units you assign to them to follow one of those strategies. So no, you are wrong, there are tons of things that can be added to make it incredible while keeping what made the original cool.
Ah, semantics yes. My girlfriend always complains that we are arguing about what the words mean rather than the core issue so that in truth we are speaking of two or more different things. All I can say is that better-trained minds than mine have been arguing about it for centuries (not the same minds for all that time but it's late, I haven't slept and you surely get my drift :P). Just for the fun of it think about this: What if language doesn't define the world but the other way around and we label things the way we do because that's the way they are?
I can be wrong, but it's my understanding that generally we observe Phenomenon A1, and either consciously or as a result of a prehistoric grunt, then we give it a name whereby Phenomenon A1 then becomes "rain". We shape the words around the world, because the world is out there a-priori. Which is another statement that has been hotly debated, but whether that world is a shadow of Platonic Ideas, an objective reality or other, we still perceive something on average, and we develop our language around that perception. It may seem otherwise because of the way language is taught to us ("Look! this is An Apple"), but you were referring to the actual existence of things ("Oh, I have observed that Phenomenon A1 takes place. I shall name Phenomenon A1 'rain'"...then to another... "Look! this is Rain"). Words don't have meaning in and of themselves, they are labels we hang onto things. If we change the labels, things remain unchanged.
"To speculate on the motivation..."
It sounds like you're already assuming that there's a mind behind it.I know exactly what you mean. Because that is the point I was making to GP ;)
Some people dislike this and they look for explanations in meta(beyond) physics."
They can just as easily say that some people don't like the uncaring universe that science reveals, and that's why they run to religion.Which is an entirely valid opinion. My point in reply to GP's reference to "crazy religious people" is that science can't speculate on any motivation behind observed phenomena, including whether motive exists at all or not. That's the reason I brought up my hypothetical Maker, to put forth a little mental experiment; is it conceivable that It may have made the rules so that It can tamper with them? Yes, it is. Not very logical, and it doesn't pass Occam's razor, but why would our hypothetical entity —capable of creating the rules— be bound by those rules? Please note that here I'm not advocating for nor against, merely presenting scenarios.
You are falling for the same trap as GP: anthropomorphizing the universe, in your case by ascribing to it the characteristic of "uncaring". I was trying to point out that science can explain how the universe "is", but not "why". "Why" demands intention otherwise it would be randomness, and devoid of intentionality asking "why" is meaningless. But intentionality (even of things human) is a very tricky business for science to disprove, and by my logic, not being able to explain intentions precludes you to give value judgments over the moral characteristics of the universe. Or in English: science can tell you the mechanics of some phenomenon but it is neutral to it and won't help you decide if it is "good", "bad" or "uncaring". That's the realm of Ethics, a discipline of Philosophy.
As of Thu 17, 21:51 Australian East time, the interface is the exact same ugly and boring simple interface from all time from my computer. Where is my eyecandy!?
You were on a roll up to this point. But here you seem to be falling for a different brand of question begging: you are tacitly assuming that there is "a reason" for things to be the way they are. So far the best explanation IMHO is another tautology... Things are the way they are, because that's the way they are.
That's the gripe with science that rational religious people have (and yes, they do exist), science can conceivably tell you how the universe works but can't tell you WHY it works that way. To speculate on the motivation for things to be the way they are is outside of the realm of science. Some people dislike this and they look for explanations in meta(beyond) physics. So basically you have to big trends, either the universe "just happened" or it was somehow made. Science could tell you down to the very last quark how the universe works in either case, it doesn't matter to it whether something put it together like this or it was just a Big Freak Accident as long as there are strings of cause and effect leading from "A" to "B" to "C" and so forth.
Conceivably if the universe was made, and The Maker tweaked it at random here and there —i.e. by performing miracles— that would thwart science's efforts to explain things because it relies on repeatability and pattern-finding. But experience so far tell us that our reality has stable behavior that doesn't change in unpredictable ways. That doesn't rule out the possibility of a maker behind curtains, for all we know s/he/it may be tweaking the world and still staying within its rules. But science won't be able to distinguish intent from random accident because it operates from inside the environment and whether the "rules" were placed or they just sprung from nowhere, they still bind it.
You just described both William Gibson's world and —brace yourself— Second Life! Yes, I know many people here hate the guts of SL, but this is exactly what it tries to be. Whether they achieve it or not is debatable, and there is the matter of it being centralized rather than distributed but that's just the idea behind it.
I was thinking more or less the same thing. But one way to solve it would be to have a plug-in adapter that you would use only when you wanted to interface with your HDTV. Or you could connect to it via some wireless adapter. There are disadvantages with this too as you would need to carry the adapter around if you wanted to use it away from home, but if this became ubiquitous maybe the connectors would come built in on the HDTV itself.
Besides, TFA mentions this Diamond Age *shudder* type of interface for stereotypical "3rd world illiterate mothers" [flamebait]because, you know, there are NO illiterates in the slums of big industrialized cities[/flamebait] where everything is done through icons. So the pictures should scale well and be very easily displayed even in good old analog cathode-ray TVs. If you were to do everything with pictograms there is little need for fine-grained resolution, and whatever text you want to display could be done in BIG LETTERS like in movie OSes =)
Damn you! You stole my possibly +1 Informative =) I agree that its a good movie. But I wonder, other than some nuts like those that spend half their day video-blogging, who would want to record every single waking —and sleeping!— moment? Well, yes, all that indexing and searching possibilities are cool and all, but you would still have to spend some time looking it up, and quite frankly memories get embellished by our minds. Just go back and read your high school angst-ridden writings and if you're matured just a bit you'll most likely find them more tiresome than interesting. Its like when we saw the retouched SW originals, they are not as awesome as we remembered them because we changed and they didn't. And there's the waste in recording again what you already saw (because you would be recording yourself watching those records... bleh). I guess I'm more analog than I thought. And don't get me started on the potential privacy breach nightmares by some random asshat with nothing better to do...
Damn! so that is what the message about sending me 'horny' pictures was about... =P
Apparently everyone and their dog use it in Russia. Right before they turned GAIM into Pidgin I installed GAIM 1.5 and logged on to my neglected yahoo and ICQ accounts. My 6 digit ICQ was still working up until this morning, and every single day I get at least 3 Russian girls (or so they claim) wanting to chat, and at least 2 spam messages in Cyrillic trying to get me to click in some shady URL that I wouldn't touch with Firefox barricaded behind the Proxomitron and a Firewall on an unpluged computer powered-off =P
At least one of the alleged Russkys I actually started chatting with is cute. They sure know how to make them in the Ukraine ;)
I suspect the reason behind this is that many people don't like the current state of affairs and they go "what, an extra 100 of this crap? No thanks!" which would explain the comments about getting bored. If you had asked me this question at certain points in the past I would probably had asked you to shut up and hand me the gun. Today I would like to live for as long as I was lucid and in good health. I guess it's all about perspective, go figure.
And another problem with that is that We The People like the way we live, whatever it may be, because that's the way we live. We grow attached to our culture and the longer we spend inside it, the harder it is for the majority to view it with a critical eye and weed out its issues. Then throw more people that learn and inherit that culture in the mix, and I think that nothing short of one of those fabled "inflection points" will modify it.
Wow, my first "flamebait" :P Totally undeserved if we judge by the responses I got, which by the way were exactly the kind of discussion I wanted to have. Oh well, enough whining. I know that population rates decline on industrialized countries, but they don't hold the bulk of the population anyway. China alone has over a billion people, yes, but India has another and they have no such policy. And neither do many of the developing countries. So unfortunately it just seems like the weight of the population is just going to shift even more towards the places where living standards aren't the greatest, which will make all the more difficult for them to improve their quality of life.
I am of two minds on this. I'd like to enjoy a longer lifespan than I would otherwise expect and I would want my loved ones (and everyone in the world for that matter) to have it too. But if according to the wikipedia we are well over SIX THOUSAND MILLION people alive at the moment, the world would find itself in a much worse position if we stopped dieing and clearing the way for younger generations.
I just moved here (Oz) last year, and I have only one thing to say to you: MOVE!
Now! =) Its just as cool as everybody says it is. But that said, this whole censorship vibe is very real. I got an "R"-rated version of Urotsukidoji (sp?) and it was totally butchered, nearly unwatchable. I'm still mad after three months, and the worst is that you can only get the uncensored original either on ebay or at comic shops that will charge you upwards of $60 AUD. And they put this god-awful HUGE color-coded banners in the front cover of all movies advertising its rating and ruining the art, it's disgusting. And a bunch of whiners got to take down an ad from the tv just last month (too lazy to look it up, but there was a /. story) because it might give toddlers ideas. It seems like the population is polarized between all-out liberalism and conservatives-to-the-bone. Not criticizing but pointing out, like I said I love the place. I have also lived in the US and it's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't raise a family there (been at Seattle, Boston, San Antonio, none worth the hassle. Maybe the countryside but I didn't have the opportunity to try that). Not to say that the US is a hellhole either, but here life is more laid back. Australia has something... or maybe they just put hypnotic drugs in the water ;)
I hate you. I was getting all excited, thanks a lot for busting my bubble with your realism =P
I'm reading Blue Mars and the utopian economics they try to set up there seem interesting. I seriously doubt a matter replicator a la StarTrek will ever become a reality —or something like in that boring book with the Lady's Primer nanomagical nonsense whose name eludes me (and while I'm at it I think 300 is dull so mod me into oblivion)—, but having renewable and near-free energy sources such as wind and solar would certainly help a great deal towards making it possible to distribute wealth more evenly.
The biggest barrier to this, IMHO, is western pro-profit capitalist mentality: You must always compete, you must always grow, you must always gain. There is little room for ties or compromises and what might be perceived as a steady-state is instead viewed as stagnation or mediocrity. Some people maintain that we do have the capacity right this day to feed the world, but many issues ranging from distribution problems to plain old greed prevent it. I want to believe that if we could find a better energy source, the cost of living would go down a bit, and the quality of living for many people in extreme poverty might improve. But I could just be naive =(
True, but how big was the original HDD? That's why I was wondering what benefits one might possibly gain that would counterbalance the loss of storage space.
Yeah, I agree on the weight thing. Less weight and better battery life, but speed I'm not so sure. I don't own an iPod but I've used a couple and I didn't think anything about the speed at all which I would propose means it's fast enough as it is, not intrusive or noticeable. After all you play the music in real time, not to chipmunk-time-warp mode. And you seek the songs scrolling with the wheelie thingie (tm), so it's not like you would gain a lot in terms of seek-time.
I'm confused by the summary. It talks about how the article gives details on how to do it, but it's not a 'how to'. Er... huh? But back to topic, I think this is cool as a technical hack but a bit pointless unless for some strange reason you absolutely need the battery life that I suspect is the only gain. Then again, getting to know how to (but not 'how to') swap your HDD might come in handy when those flash-based HDDs come to the market at reasonable prices.
Well that makes more sense. I stand corrected =)