And finally, there's Nextel. It uses a custom technology (iDEN) and caters to business users who use their cellphone enough to warrant a $150/mo plan and want to-the-second billing. It is essentially a niche carrier, with very loyal customers, and as many of those customers travel the world, it may soon switch to GSM itself.
The iDEN system is already in a number of countries - Nextel has a number of them covered, but there are also a significant number of other companies using the same system. MIKE in Canada, for example, and assorted local companies. There are iDEN phones available designed for being used around the world - the i2000plus. There are iDEN phones available that have embedded Java for app development, and the i95cl has been introduced recently with a color screen.
They've moved beyond targetting just business users, though there's still a large percentage of their userbase made up of that demographic. That's why they are coming up with a bigger variety of phones with more interesting appearances.
There is also NO consideration of iDEN or Nextel moving to GSM. Nextel has been looking at going to a CDMA variant, and Motorola has offered some solutions to that end.
You got the name close - it was Solar Fox. You didn't have to hit the dots in a certain time to advance, but if you did, you skipped a board and got the maximum points you could get from it.
Every 5 levels was challenge level, you had to finish completely to score any points. There were only 20 levels, which repeated tougher and tougher.
Yes, I rememeber, I made it to at least level 41...
If you think about it, the entire idea of pledging allegiance to a FLAG, a piece of cloth, is pretty darn creepy. It's things like that that give people the idea to create a constitutional amendment to prevent burning a flag - as if that act somehow takes away freedom - it's the amendment that would be taking away freedom.
Repeating the pledge, every day in school, over and over, seems an awfully lot like an attempt to indoctrinate children, instead of educating them.
I harbor no special feelings for the flag, or toward the name of this county. My feelings are for the liberty and freedom themselves, as they're what is important, not some design on cloth.
Generations - They could have done so much between the casts and didn't
Screw that - what made Generations so bad was a plot hole big enough to fly the entire Federtion fleet through all at once.
Let's see, distress call at station, Enterprise goes to help, bad guy abucts Geordi and blows up star, getting away. Eventually, they track him down, Picard goes to planet, fails to stop him, sucked into Nexus. While in Nexus, Picard can travel to ANY point in time? Does he go back to back in orbit, knowing where to use torpedos/phasers to destroy the launch site? Does he go back to just when the star explodes, so they can head STRAIGHT to the destination planet, beating the other ship? Or, even more intelligently, does he go back to when they first arrive at the station, so they can toss the bad guy in the brig, search the station, find the torpedo set to destroy the star, and prevent the whole thing?
OF COURSE NOT. We go back to just a couple minutes ago, with an overweight, horrible actor playing a previous Enterprise captain, at a time when they still have a really tough time defeating the enemy - never mind that they could be totally aware that, should they screw up, they'd go back into the Nexus to try again, and again, and again.
Why go back to that moment? It makes absolutely no sense, unless you're deliberately trying to make stopping the bad guy as DIFFICULT as possible.
Oh, and BTW, First Contact's huge plot hole? The Borg could simply have sent the probe back in time at some other place in the galaxy, not having alerted the federation to their plans, therefore, not having had any challenge to their assimilation. But then again, adding time travel instantly makes it insanely difficult to prevent plot holes, due to the way things can work out.
I thought Insurrection was the best of the three because of the comparative lack of plot holes.
I don't think the currency is ugly at all. Far from it. While other countries' gaudy bills look like flyers for some cheap rave, our distinctive greenbacks always look exactly like money.
You've got that idea backwards. We don't feel that the US money is money because of some special feature it has that foreign countries don't, but because we were taught that US money is our money, thus got used to it, and that is why other countries' currency doesn't seem like money.
If the US used colors and other countries were all monochrome, you'd be arguing against going monochrome, claiming only the US's bills look like real currency.
How does changing the currency help? Hmm, improved anti-counterfeiting. Quicker identification of bills by sight. Reduced number of people making mistakes by handing over the wrong bill.
But if you CAN'T tell at a glance how much money you have, then you need to pull it all out and count it. Which means it's out and available to grab for much more time, giving others more opportunity to see it.
The monochrome is useful if you know how much you have - if you need to count it, at least to a general idea, then colors would be many times more useful for that purpose.
If you're in line at a concert, and want to find out if you have enough for a couple t-shirts, would you rather pull out a wad of bills and carefully count them, or pull them out, glance at them, and put them back? Or even better, not take them out of your purse/wallet, and just glance at the edges? I sure would find that easier.
I guess it's just that I've spent way too much time living in the Suburbs, and anyone who's lived in them knows damn well the suburbs are completely without culture (other than the culture of consumerism).
There's a reason I have plans to move INTO a city (such as Boston) - so I can get somewhere where there actually is culture, people that walk from place to place (instead of taking moving metal boxes everywhere), and getting past the feeling of being the only person around cause everyone's so isolated from each other.
Apparently, up until now people in the US are patriotic to the extreme and can't stand to see their precious 'greenbacks' changed.. so it's about time this happened.. Let's hope they don't encounter too much resistance eh?
They are going to encounter a ton of resitance from US citizens. Heck, just read the messages in this disussion so far, and you'll see that even geeks, the ones you think would be more interested in new things and change, are freaking out, and attacking the idea even though there's not a single valid complaint that I've seen so far.
It's all been "I don't want a rainbow in my wallet" or accusing non-Americans of being unable to read numbers (though they don't realize most non-Americans don't read the numbers on their currency because they use different colors, so they're not used to it).
I suspect the public outcry against this will be huge, and people might even try and find some way to work 9/11 and "not surrendering to terrorists" into this.
It's no wonder that Europe and Japan create fancy new technology and implement it left and right (maglev trains, alternative fuel cars, etc), while America sticks to inventing weapons of war, new food additives, and new ways to patent/copyright information so that nobody can use it - cause new technology requires new ideas and change, and if even the geeks can't accept the color of their money changing, imagine something that could actually be disruptive.
Re:You've got to be kidding me
on
Greenbacks No More
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Remember, most people from other countries can tell the denominations of bills apart by just a quick glance at their color.
Imagine growing up, always having color as an identifying mark for currency. Suddenly, you're somewhere else, you pull out your money, and it's all the same color! Sure, they can look at it, but it's more effort than they're used to. Sure, not that much effort overall, but when you're used to one thing, and you have to do a little more, that can really throw you off.
Go try dialing a rotary phone, and see if you don't find it annoying just because of the time difference.
When it comes down to it, the US has some of the ugliest money in the world. Every bit of currency from other countries that I've seen has been colorful, and interesting to look at. The US? Well, ugly green. Always and forever.
Perhaps you can evaluate a society by how artistic their currency is. The US is probably on the bottom rung of how interesting the money is. Hmm, yes, sounds like how interesting the culture is, also.
I've been doing a treadmill for 3-5 times a week for a year and a half. I can jog a decent amount of time without even breaking a sweat now. I'm not in amazing shape, but definately doing pretty well.
I played a game of DDR, and was starting to sweat at the end of the 5th song. My legs were noticably tired also. It is not a poor-quality workout. Sure, there are better ways if a workout is your only goal - but this is nothing to blow off. Especially the harder levels, which look a hell of a lot tougher than even my treadmill, due to the constant shifting of a person's weight and center of gravity.
Nope. I read it on DDR Freak and posted it here, since it wasn't posted. So, definately not the same person. Though I did also submit it to BottomQuark.
First of all, it is not a sit-and-play game. Just the opposite - you play by using your feet to step on four directional sensors in time to the music, with steps provided by the game. Even the easy levels can be a workout. The hard levels are amazing to watch, and I can tell are really strenuous.
The whole point of using this game is that it requires a lot of physical activity. Video game doesn't instanenously mean sitting-on-your-behind anymore...
BTW - go find yourself a DDR machine and try it out, it is incredibly fun.
Just to let you know, the lines you quotes were not, in fact, written by any of the Slashdot editors, but were, actually, written entirely by the submitter.
Besides, DDR seems to be doing what many people suspected was impossible - teaching white guys how to dance.:)
This video game thing is pathetic. This country goes more downhill every year.
Obviously you haven't ever played Dance Dance Revolution.
I have a treadmill, one that I use 3-5 times a week for a workout. You know what? I'm planning on getting DDR for my Playstation - why just run on a treadmill, when I can get as good a workout with DDR, and have a lot more fun in the process?
Next thing you know, you'll be complaining about those rowing machines that make it into a game by having you race a computer opponent.
It is not like they're sitting there on their behind playing Quake for hours on end - they're up and moving around, getting exercise. Quality exercise. Does it matter there's a screen around making it into a game? I think not.
Presumably the arcade mats are a lot more study, but is the difference in cost really worth it to them, do you think?
I would assume, as someone pointed out in another comment, that the machines are donated, or rented out - after all, it sounded like they are making them available for kids to pay for and play when they're not being used in gym class.
If they JUST wanted them for gym, they could even get arcade quality hard metal platforms at about $120 a pop - they could have a ton of them running for the same cost as one arcade machine - probably enough for the entire class.
The song is "The Eyes of Truth", from the second Enigma album, "The Cross of Changes" - and the rest of the song, and the entire album, are just as good as that clip.
Perhaps someone could answer a question for me that I've always wondered about.
Exactly WHY are devices, such as the 2.4 GHz Part 15 devices mentioned in the article, required to accept all interference? What is gained by not allowing products to be [shielded] from unwanted interference/RF signals?
Actually, the Napster/RIAA situation does have some relevance when discussing nanotechnology.
Assuming strong nanotech somewhere down the line, there will be the ability to turn any physical object into information, and use the information to assemble a copy of that object.
You think corporations are reacting badly when music/movies can be freely copied - wait until people can freely duplicate physical objects. You want to talk about scaring the CEOs of corporations into action!
In fact, I bet there are more evil uses of this technology than there could be benifits.
If you really feel that way, you must have a serious lack of imagination.
Utility Fog is just one of the creative ideas that has been come up with.
Go to the Foresight Institute web site and read Engines of Creation and Unbounding the Future if you want to see how much benefit is possible from molecular machines.
Nanotechnology can pose a great threat to our survival.
Nuclear weapons pose a great threat. Genetic engineering poses a great threat. New technology always brings new dangers along with new benefits.
The fact is, nanotechnology is coming. Attempts to stop it are futile - and will likely result in bringing around the bad effects originally predicted. Trying to stop or slow it isn't the right approach if you want to prevent it from being used in negative ways.
anything that impedes freedom. pretty straight foreward.
Like Ashcroft's campaign to take away the freedom for people to commit suicide in Oregon - that the voters approved, twice?
Like the fact that you don't have the freedom to marry whomever you wish?
Like the fact that in some states, you don't have the freedom to have sex with another adult of the same sex? (even if the laws aren't that enforced)
That in some areas of the country, women don't have the freedom to live in a house in large numbers? (sorority houses are banned in places such as Evansville, IN, because they're defined as a "brothel")
I can go on and on about how many ways the government willingly impedes freedom.
"Freedom" is a buzzword in America that isn't really taken seriously.
I liken it to submarines (one of which I served on). You can say submarines are evil, cowardly, nasty, yadda, yadda. That isn't going to stop your enemies (current, future, potential) from building them, sinking your shipping, parking them off your coast with missles, etc.
Or you can build your own submarines, go down there, find them, and blow them apart. Works better than trying to ban them, or something.
It is vitally important that work on defense involving nanotechnology is done. I agree there.
But the part that worries me is that the US military will make the same mistake they always tend to make - that "defense" equals "offense". That defending this country means making weapons that can kill millions of people.
Nanotechnology does not have to yield the same old killing-machine weapons that they're used to turning out. Shields and other defensive mechanisms would not only be possible, but necessary, and by far the best route.
If they want to keep other countries from sending molecular machine spies into the US, they can do it by putting up networks of protective machines that will destroy unauthorized machines, instead of threatening to turn their country into goo.
I just hope they look in this direction instead of the offensive direction - rapid proliferation of offensive nanotechnology weapons will make the cold war over nuclear weapons seem tame.
All it takes is one bozo to put an = where he should have put an == to turn the whole planet into grey goo. I've been programming for nearly two decades now, professionally for a decade. I've followed behind other programmers. I would not trust 99.999% of them (Including myself, by the way) to program nanomachines.
If the level of competency of engineers designing molecular machines is that horrid, then, well, we have nothing to worry about.
Molecular machines that would self-replicate out of control isn't exactly an EASY thing to create. It's not like someone making a machine to snatch CO2 molecules from the air will accidentally insert an extra line of code that will make it turn into something that creates grey goo. You have to set out to make such a machine - and there really is no use to making something that will replicate out of control from elements abundant in the environment.
There are multiple BASIC ways to prevent such a scenario - such as using a trace element in the machine that isn't widely available will make sure that you won't have widespread goo.
The nanotech books Engines of Creation and Unbounding the Future, both available on-line at the Foresight Institute, both discuss this issue in detail.
Runaway machines turning all matter into more machines created by accident are a far remote possibility. Now, ones created maliciously are a bit of a different story.
Disasterbation is a useless mental activity you should try to give up.
Does this mean that we will finally have a search engine with categories that actually mean something?
The categories used by Google are just the actual content of the Open Directory Project, which is all done by human volunteers. Google doesn't just assign categories based on page content, but what DMOZ editors did.
If you have a problem with the categorization found on Google, then go to the ODP, sign up, and help out yourself.
Am I the only person on slashdot who suspects that maybe this probably isn't that desirable to geek chicks?
Let's put it like this - if you ever consider giving a geek girl a stuffed animal as a Valentine's Day, Birthday, or Anniversary present, THIS is the kind of stuffed animal to give! All the cuteness, with some serious functionality to boot!
I'd love to have one of these serving as a USB hub for my desk - it won't reduce the clutter, but it will sure make it look better!
Slashdot Mirror
And finally, there's Nextel. It uses a custom technology (iDEN) and caters to business users who use their cellphone enough to warrant a $150/mo plan and want to-the-second billing. It is essentially a niche carrier, with very loyal customers, and as many of those customers travel the world, it may soon switch to GSM itself.
The iDEN system is already in a number of countries - Nextel has a number of them covered, but there are also a significant number of other companies using the same system. MIKE in Canada, for example, and assorted local companies. There are iDEN phones available designed for being used around the world - the i2000plus. There are iDEN phones available that have embedded Java for app development, and the i95cl has been introduced recently with a color screen.
They've moved beyond targetting just business users, though there's still a large percentage of their userbase made up of that demographic. That's why they are coming up with a bigger variety of phones with more interesting appearances.
There is also NO consideration of iDEN or Nextel moving to GSM. Nextel has been looking at going to a CDMA variant, and Motorola has offered some solutions to that end.
Trust me, I work on iDEN.
You got the name close - it was Solar Fox. You didn't have to hit the dots in a certain time to advance, but if you did, you skipped a board and got the maximum points you could get from it.
Every 5 levels was challenge level, you had to finish completely to score any points. There were only 20 levels, which repeated tougher and tougher.
Yes, I rememeber, I made it to at least level 41...
If you think about it, the entire idea of pledging allegiance to a FLAG, a piece of cloth, is pretty darn creepy. It's things like that that give people the idea to create a constitutional amendment to prevent burning a flag - as if that act somehow takes away freedom - it's the amendment that would be taking away freedom.
Repeating the pledge, every day in school, over and over, seems an awfully lot like an attempt to indoctrinate children, instead of educating them.
I harbor no special feelings for the flag, or toward the name of this county. My feelings are for the liberty and freedom themselves, as they're what is important, not some design on cloth.
Generations - They could have done so much between the casts and didn't
Screw that - what made Generations so bad was a plot hole big enough to fly the entire Federtion fleet through all at once.
Let's see, distress call at station, Enterprise goes to help, bad guy abucts Geordi and blows up star, getting away. Eventually, they track him down, Picard goes to planet, fails to stop him, sucked into Nexus. While in Nexus, Picard can travel to ANY point in time? Does he go back to back in orbit, knowing where to use torpedos/phasers to destroy the launch site? Does he go back to just when the star explodes, so they can head STRAIGHT to the destination planet, beating the other ship? Or, even more intelligently, does he go back to when they first arrive at the station, so they can toss the bad guy in the brig, search the station, find the torpedo set to destroy the star, and prevent the whole thing?
OF COURSE NOT. We go back to just a couple minutes ago, with an overweight, horrible actor playing a previous Enterprise captain, at a time when they still have a really tough time defeating the enemy - never mind that they could be totally aware that, should they screw up, they'd go back into the Nexus to try again, and again, and again.
Why go back to that moment? It makes absolutely no sense, unless you're deliberately trying to make stopping the bad guy as DIFFICULT as possible.
Oh, and BTW, First Contact's huge plot hole? The Borg could simply have sent the probe back in time at some other place in the galaxy, not having alerted the federation to their plans, therefore, not having had any challenge to their assimilation. But then again, adding time travel instantly makes it insanely difficult to prevent plot holes, due to the way things can work out.
I thought Insurrection was the best of the three because of the comparative lack of plot holes.
I don't think the currency is ugly at all. Far from it. While other countries' gaudy bills look like flyers for some cheap rave, our distinctive greenbacks always look exactly like money.
You've got that idea backwards. We don't feel that the US money is money because of some special feature it has that foreign countries don't, but because we were taught that US money is our money, thus got used to it, and that is why other countries' currency doesn't seem like money.
If the US used colors and other countries were all monochrome, you'd be arguing against going monochrome, claiming only the US's bills look like real currency.
How does changing the currency help? Hmm, improved anti-counterfeiting. Quicker identification of bills by sight. Reduced number of people making mistakes by handing over the wrong bill.
But if you CAN'T tell at a glance how much money you have, then you need to pull it all out and count it. Which means it's out and available to grab for much more time, giving others more opportunity to see it.
The monochrome is useful if you know how much you have - if you need to count it, at least to a general idea, then colors would be many times more useful for that purpose.
If you're in line at a concert, and want to find out if you have enough for a couple t-shirts, would you rather pull out a wad of bills and carefully count them, or pull them out, glance at them, and put them back? Or even better, not take them out of your purse/wallet, and just glance at the edges? I sure would find that easier.
Yes, I know, I was spouting off a bit there.
I guess it's just that I've spent way too much time living in the Suburbs, and anyone who's lived in them knows damn well the suburbs are completely without culture (other than the culture of consumerism).
There's a reason I have plans to move INTO a city (such as Boston) - so I can get somewhere where there actually is culture, people that walk from place to place (instead of taking moving metal boxes everywhere), and getting past the feeling of being the only person around cause everyone's so isolated from each other.
Apparently, up until now people in the US are patriotic to the extreme and can't stand to see their precious 'greenbacks' changed.. so it's about time this happened.. Let's hope they don't encounter too much resistance eh?
They are going to encounter a ton of resitance from US citizens. Heck, just read the messages in this disussion so far, and you'll see that even geeks, the ones you think would be more interested in new things and change, are freaking out, and attacking the idea even though there's not a single valid complaint that I've seen so far.
It's all been "I don't want a rainbow in my wallet" or accusing non-Americans of being unable to read numbers (though they don't realize most non-Americans don't read the numbers on their currency because they use different colors, so they're not used to it).
I suspect the public outcry against this will be huge, and people might even try and find some way to work 9/11 and "not surrendering to terrorists" into this.
It's no wonder that Europe and Japan create fancy new technology and implement it left and right (maglev trains, alternative fuel cars, etc), while America sticks to inventing weapons of war, new food additives, and new ways to patent/copyright information so that nobody can use it - cause new technology requires new ideas and change, and if even the geeks can't accept the color of their money changing, imagine something that could actually be disruptive.
Remember, most people from other countries can tell the denominations of bills apart by just a quick glance at their color.
Imagine growing up, always having color as an identifying mark for currency. Suddenly, you're somewhere else, you pull out your money, and it's all the same color! Sure, they can look at it, but it's more effort than they're used to. Sure, not that much effort overall, but when you're used to one thing, and you have to do a little more, that can really throw you off.
Go try dialing a rotary phone, and see if you don't find it annoying just because of the time difference.
When it comes down to it, the US has some of the ugliest money in the world. Every bit of currency from other countries that I've seen has been colorful, and interesting to look at. The US? Well, ugly green. Always and forever.
Perhaps you can evaluate a society by how artistic their currency is. The US is probably on the bottom rung of how interesting the money is. Hmm, yes, sounds like how interesting the culture is, also.
I've been doing a treadmill for 3-5 times a week for a year and a half. I can jog a decent amount of time without even breaking a sweat now. I'm not in amazing shape, but definately doing pretty well.
I played a game of DDR, and was starting to sweat at the end of the 5th song. My legs were noticably tired also. It is not a poor-quality workout. Sure, there are better ways if a workout is your only goal - but this is nothing to blow off. Especially the harder levels, which look a hell of a lot tougher than even my treadmill, due to the constant shifting of a person's weight and center of gravity.
Nope. I read it on DDR Freak and posted it here, since it wasn't posted. So, definately not the same person. Though I did also submit it to BottomQuark.
You, obviously, have never even seen DDR.
First of all, it is not a sit-and-play game. Just the opposite - you play by using your feet to step on four directional sensors in time to the music, with steps provided by the game. Even the easy levels can be a workout. The hard levels are amazing to watch, and I can tell are really strenuous.
The whole point of using this game is that it requires a lot of physical activity. Video game doesn't instanenously mean sitting-on-your-behind anymore...
BTW - go find yourself a DDR machine and try it out, it is incredibly fun.
Just to let you know, the lines you quotes were not, in fact, written by any of the Slashdot editors, but were, actually, written entirely by the submitter.
:)
Besides, DDR seems to be doing what many people suspected was impossible - teaching white guys how to dance.
This video game thing is pathetic. This country goes more downhill every year.
Obviously you haven't ever played Dance Dance Revolution.
I have a treadmill, one that I use 3-5 times a week for a workout. You know what? I'm planning on getting DDR for my Playstation - why just run on a treadmill, when I can get as good a workout with DDR, and have a lot more fun in the process?
Next thing you know, you'll be complaining about those rowing machines that make it into a game by having you race a computer opponent.
It is not like they're sitting there on their behind playing Quake for hours on end - they're up and moving around, getting exercise. Quality exercise. Does it matter there's a screen around making it into a game? I think not.
Presumably the arcade mats are a lot more study, but is the difference in cost really worth it to them, do you think?
I would assume, as someone pointed out in another comment, that the machines are donated, or rented out - after all, it sounded like they are making them available for kids to pay for and play when they're not being used in gym class.
If they JUST wanted them for gym, they could even get arcade quality hard metal platforms at about $120 a pop - they could have a ton of them running for the same cost as one arcade machine - probably enough for the entire class.
The song is "The Eyes of Truth", from the second Enigma album, "The Cross of Changes" - and the rest of the song, and the entire album, are just as good as that clip.
Perhaps someone could answer a question for me that I've always wondered about.
Exactly WHY are devices, such as the 2.4 GHz Part 15 devices mentioned in the article, required to accept all interference? What is gained by not allowing products to be [shielded] from unwanted interference/RF signals?
Actually, the Napster/RIAA situation does have some relevance when discussing nanotechnology.
Assuming strong nanotech somewhere down the line, there will be the ability to turn any physical object into information, and use the information to assemble a copy of that object.
You think corporations are reacting badly when music/movies can be freely copied - wait until people can freely duplicate physical objects. You want to talk about scaring the CEOs of corporations into action!
In fact, I bet there are more evil uses of this technology than there could be benifits.
If you really feel that way, you must have a serious lack of imagination.
Utility Fog is just one of the creative ideas that has been come up with.
Go to the Foresight Institute web site and read Engines of Creation and Unbounding the Future if you want to see how much benefit is possible from molecular machines.
Nanotechnology can pose a great threat to our survival.
Nuclear weapons pose a great threat. Genetic engineering poses a great threat. New technology always brings new dangers along with new benefits.
The fact is, nanotechnology is coming. Attempts to stop it are futile - and will likely result in bringing around the bad effects originally predicted. Trying to stop or slow it isn't the right approach if you want to prevent it from being used in negative ways.
US definition of evil:
anything that impedes freedom. pretty straight foreward.
Like Ashcroft's campaign to take away the freedom for people to commit suicide in Oregon - that the voters approved, twice?
Like the fact that you don't have the freedom to marry whomever you wish?
Like the fact that in some states, you don't have the freedom to have sex with another adult of the same sex? (even if the laws aren't that enforced)
That in some areas of the country, women don't have the freedom to live in a house in large numbers? (sorority houses are banned in places such as Evansville, IN, because they're defined as a "brothel")
I can go on and on about how many ways the government willingly impedes freedom.
"Freedom" is a buzzword in America that isn't really taken seriously.
No, essential that defense is involved in it.
I liken it to submarines (one of which I served on). You can say submarines are evil, cowardly, nasty, yadda, yadda. That isn't going to stop your enemies (current, future, potential) from building them, sinking your shipping, parking them off your coast with missles, etc.
Or you can build your own submarines, go down there, find them, and blow them apart. Works better than trying to ban them, or something.
It is vitally important that work on defense involving nanotechnology is done. I agree there.
But the part that worries me is that the US military will make the same mistake they always tend to make - that "defense" equals "offense". That defending this country means making weapons that can kill millions of people.
Nanotechnology does not have to yield the same old killing-machine weapons that they're used to turning out. Shields and other defensive mechanisms would not only be possible, but necessary, and by far the best route.
If they want to keep other countries from sending molecular machine spies into the US, they can do it by putting up networks of protective machines that will destroy unauthorized machines, instead of threatening to turn their country into goo.
I just hope they look in this direction instead of the offensive direction - rapid proliferation of offensive nanotechnology weapons will make the cold war over nuclear weapons seem tame.
All it takes is one bozo to put an = where he should have put an == to turn the whole planet into grey goo. I've been programming for nearly two decades now, professionally for a decade. I've followed behind other programmers. I would not trust 99.999% of them (Including myself, by the way) to program nanomachines.
If the level of competency of engineers designing molecular machines is that horrid, then, well, we have nothing to worry about.
Molecular machines that would self-replicate out of control isn't exactly an EASY thing to create. It's not like someone making a machine to snatch CO2 molecules from the air will accidentally insert an extra line of code that will make it turn into something that creates grey goo. You have to set out to make such a machine - and there really is no use to making something that will replicate out of control from elements abundant in the environment.
There are multiple BASIC ways to prevent such a scenario - such as using a trace element in the machine that isn't widely available will make sure that you won't have widespread goo.
The nanotech books Engines of Creation and Unbounding the Future, both available on-line at the Foresight Institute, both discuss this issue in detail.
Runaway machines turning all matter into more machines created by accident are a far remote possibility. Now, ones created maliciously are a bit of a different story.
Disasterbation is a useless mental activity you should try to give up.
Does this mean that we will finally have a search engine with categories that actually mean something?
The categories used by Google are just the actual content of the Open Directory Project, which is all done by human volunteers. Google doesn't just assign categories based on page content, but what DMOZ editors did.
If you have a problem with the categorization found on Google, then go to the ODP, sign up, and help out yourself.
Am I the only person on slashdot who suspects that maybe this probably isn't that desirable to geek chicks?
Let's put it like this - if you ever consider giving a geek girl a stuffed animal as a Valentine's Day, Birthday, or Anniversary present, THIS is the kind of stuffed animal to give! All the cuteness, with some serious functionality to boot!
I'd love to have one of these serving as a USB hub for my desk - it won't reduce the clutter, but it will sure make it look better!