I'm suprised that nobody has brought up either of two points I think are relevant to whether WOTC is embracing Open Gaming...
First, they took serious legal action against some people that were distributing new M:TG "cards" as stickers to be placed on top of old ones, as a private expansion set. I think they even uses different symbols for the mana, and backgrounds, but because they were obviously meant to be played with Magic, they went after them.
And WOTC actually has a patent(!) on many of their game mechanics. They've patented "tapping" a card, as in turning it sideways on the play area to indicate that it's been used. This is most definately NOT open... ---
The problem then goes back to that covered in the old GPL/BSD licensing debate.
What are you going to do about those corporations, who take what you make, make something better, feed that to your friends, and refuse to allow you to create from what they have made?
It's not really free if the corporations don't have the chance to use it also, of course. But they shouldn't have the right to borrow from what we did without letting us borrow from what they've done. They just have to understand that before they get involved - if so many other people can happy participate in that environment, then they can't use their bigger size to change the rules just so they can make their money. ---
The government and companies are not going to try a different route as long as people keep making the purchases and paying attention. Do you think that Fox and Lucas are going to lighten up on the Star Wars copyrights and trademarks while people keep watching and buying the movies, buying the merchandise, and being rabid fans? They have no reason to. They can keep as much as possible to themselves without much of a penalty.
If you don't like it, stop buying it, stop watching it. Instead of writing fan fiction, get together with other people and create your own setting, that you can write about and do whatever you want with. There's no reason we can't have the equivalent of open source in that area. Why not try and make all those laws irrelevant? ---
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but don't yout think that just maybe OPEC/the oil companies had more than a little part in holding back progress & discouraging innovation?
...or maybe I'm just bitter that gas prices are 72.9 cents a litre ($CAN) despite the fact that it's produced here in Alberta.
To be honest, I'm of split mind about the recent huge increase in gas prices. It's horrible having to spend to much to fill up the car, but perhaps if OPEC continues to use it's monopoly power to driver up prices, people will start to consider alternative fuel sources more seriously, instead of just as a novelty.
What better way to give feedback to OPEC then to tell them "no thanks, we don't need much oil anymore" and watch their fortunes (and maybe the political instability of the area) dry up due to greed. ---
I hope Intel and AMD continue their little battle - I'd love to see more companies get involved. After all, we're the ones that benefit from it from faster chips and cheaper prices.
Too bad car companies don't put as much effort into improving over each other instead of just advertising better - we'd be driving much safer and fuel efficient things... ---
Please someone hack UFO: Enemy unknown so it's usable on anything higher that 486/33 or else I'll had to do it:)
Now if there ever was a game that needed to have the source code released, this is the one.
It would let us fix it so faster machines could run it, all the annoying bugs could be taken care of, and I'm sure there could be plenty of enhancements to give the game even more new life (net-play anyone)?
On that note... anyone want to start a write-in campaign to see if we can get them to release the source? After all, they've got the X-Com Commander's Pack (or whatever it's calle dout), and I'm sure that releasing the source would generate quite a few more sales of it for them, and if a lot of people wrote in and said "we'd buy it if...", perhaps they'd notice? ---
Forgive me if I sound like a hopeless math luser, but how did you come to this number? 99.999% uptime tells me nothing. 99.999% of *what*? A year? A day? A nano-second?
The number he arrived at was using the time period of a year.
99.999% is rather general, but it's supposed to be. You want the product to spend 99.999% of the amount of time is trying to be used in a running state. If you're designing software that will only be run for an hour once a week, then spending that hour, even once, having the software not work will pretty much guarantee the software isn't 99.999% because of how long it takes to make up the downtime. How long? One hour of downtime required about 12 years of uptime to balance off.
It's EXTREMELY hard to do, because upgrades, maintenance, and even failures all have to be handled without the software going down. ---
I can't believe that I was the only one impressed with the appearance of Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes reprising their roles of Jay and Silent Bob. My friends and I seemed to be the only people in the theatre laughing at their cameo.
There does seem to be a lack of notice of who they were, but I caught it and found it quite funny... ---
I am not sure that your suggestion would be completely in the interests of the political candidate - these guys want to be all things to all people, and often that means keeping hush hush about some of the opinions they hold or may have had in the past. This would be more appropriate functionality for an independant politics website.
If one politician starts presenting the facts in that manner, then it could really hurt if the others don't do it. When one says "I've always been for so-and-so", and then can list every vote she's been in, and prove she's been for it, that could be a big help, especially against the "I've always been for it - but been voting against it" type people.
And honestly, I'd much rather see a politican that will admit their past and deal with it instead of hiding it. ---
I am not normally one to followup my own posts, or question the moderation...
But in this case... I am totally stumped why this one would be considered offtopic? I know the moderator cannot respond, but maybe someone else who feels this way? ---
The current political candidate sites seem to be little more than political rhetoric and volunteer information. Are there any plans to treat the website differently than a brodcast medium? I mean, including interactivity, such as message areas for open discussions, polling booths to get a feel for what people are really interested in. And also perhaps for offering large amounts of data about a candidate's past actions in government, such as voting records (and perhaps reasons for the vote).
About 50% of the food in the US is gentetically modified and that probably means that yes, your pizza is.
Ummm... I'd be willing to be almost all of the food we eat is genetically modified in some way. You think the tomatoes grown today were like that a couple thousand years ago? Heck, so are our pets, and our children. It's called "selective breeding" - carefully choosing which plants/animals mate to enhance certain characteristics. It's all in an effort to modify the genetics.
The only difference with genetic engineering is that they skip the whole breeding step and just change the DNA to start with. The breeding is just as likely to cause harmful characteristics as the engineering. ---
There is a REASON that/. lets you turn off certain subjects so you don't see them.
But I continue to see the same people, time after time, replying to Katz's writings just to flame. You help make some of his points for him.
I just don't get it anymore. It's like any other Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder. But instead of washing your hands 5 times in a row, or constantly checking the rooms to make sure the lights are turned off, you're unable to resist reading the story and repeating the same old anti-Katz rhetoric. It almost seems like someone wrote a Katz-flame generator, the comments are so unoriginal.
Is there some purpose to the constant flaming? Can you give us some reason why it does anything other than annoy the rest of us? ---
Yes, human brain is just a result of evolution; yes, there is no ultimate purpose; but to leap from that to 'there can be no consciousness in a pourely material Universe without god' is simply an idiotic appeal to personal incredulity of an uneducated religious fool who cannot conceive of themselves as not being special.
I'll be glad to see when technology and science can finally give us an answer to this question. After all, if an artificial consciousness can be created, it demonstrates the lack of any "spark" given to a biological being, of any "soul".
Heck emergent behavior currently being exhibited in neural nets kind of suggests that consciousness is just something that results from a complex set of elements that influence each other and change over time. ---
s it only me who thinks that assuming consciousness is a human-only trait is just a little bit arrogant? I see no evidence in any of my scientific training to suggest that consciousness is limited to the human experience - in fact having watched numerous stunning nature programs (thanks BBC:-) ) I'd say consciousness was a far more widespread condition than we give it credit for.
I remember hearing something once that if you look at the size of the brain (or was it ratio of size of brain to size of animal... I forget which) and compare it to the demonstrated intelligence, it seems to form a very accurate measure. If you look at this throughout the entire animal kindgom, it seems to hold true. But that, with this system, humans only achieve the #2 spot - dolphins are number one on this scale. It is interesting to wonder if the only reason that we humans made civilization was because of being on land and being able to manipulate objects, and that dolphins are the smarter ones... ---
You might want to check out the propinball series for PC. The next best thing to owning your own.
I was going to mention them also...
And the best thing is - not only do they provide a very convincing simulation of a real pinball machine (down to the ball hitting the glass), but the tables are well designed tables. Timeshock! would make a very good real machine.
Though it still can't quite replicate the experience of actually playing on a real machine. I know I'm picking up a machine or two as soon as I live somewhere with the room. (So sad that Williams has stopped making pinball machines - they've always made the very best ones) ---
Six sigma... now there is a tedious thing to go through.:-) ISO-900x just guarantees you have documented everything you do; six sigma is the practicality of ISO -- six failures in every million.
Hmmm... you know, maybe that's what the Justice Department could do to penalize Microsoft. Require them to implement the Six Sigma program there, and get all their products compliant. Considering the current state of their software, it would either destroy them when they couldn't do it, or at least slow and bog their releases so much that other companies can somewhat catch up.
As it is now, they're, what, point-six sigma?:) ---
If you produce a self-reproducing nanomachine and release it into the wild, you loose all ability to control it (ultimately). It immediately falls under the perview of natural selection and evolution. You can put your finger in and affect little bits of if but you cannot control the thing as a whole. Even if you had strong control over the replication process, random error will work to evolve nanomachines, as a subset of the whole mass, that are no longer under your control.
There are a number of methods that can be implemented to attempt to keep this sort of thing from happening.
First of all, self-replicating nanomachines may not need to be commonplace - we may be able to get away with ONLY having assemblers doing the construction/replication, and never build this ability into anything else.
Second, we can implement various checks to help prevent it. Require a nanomachine to compare itself with x neighbors before it can duplicate itself. If it stores instructions in itself somewhere, then make it two sets stored in different locations (maybe in different ways), and if the two do not match exactly, self destruct. In any group of "wild" replicators, require a certain percentage of them to be police nanomachines, checking the others for flaws.
It's true that no method can prevent it from ever happening, but we can make it so unlikely as to rest at ease.
And we can always just create the instructions and structures in ways that any "mutation" will be much more likely to make it non-operational. ---
I dinged my car yesterday. It has a flaw now. I dinged my toe on the coffe table two days ago. I am not flawed anymore.
You misunderstood me on this point.
Sure, you have temporary flaws from minor injuries. But no amount of healing is going to fix the flaws in the "design" of your body. Your blood vessels will never move from in front of your retina to behind, increasing your vision. Your urethra will never stop going through your prostate (yes, a collapsable tube running through an organ that has a tendency to expand). And check the Talk.Origins web site for plenty more examples of these kinds of flaws in living creatures.
Nature is not perfect. Far from it.
f you think we can do better with metal and silicon than nature has done with carbohydrates and proteins, I would be suprised.
Do nuclear weapons count? I think they're a tad more effective. And there's always the black goo/grey goo scenarios, that if they were to occur, could quite possibly destroy ALL life on (and in) the planet, rendering it completely uninhabitable. ---
On a side note, does anyone really believe that nanotech is that amazing? Look at your cells. Nature has been there and done that, probably more efficiently than we will ever be able to do it.
Yes, nature does things quite efficiently. But not even near optimal.
The nervous system in our body uses electrical impulses to transmit the sensory data. But that's not even close to the speed at which computers transmit their data.
The bones in our body grow and are alive, so they can't possibly have the strength of the "skeletons" we use for cars and buildings.
We can already do some things better than nature ever could. Evolution isn't going to bother making something optimal if it doesn't really deliver a substantial benefit. It doesn't even guarantee there won't be any serious flaws - most living things, in fact, have these "flaws". ---
have you ever seen a macro device that even comes close to doing this? ever see a robot that could build a copy of itself from basic parts?
There is no reason why this couldn't be built, assuming that the robot was designed in a more modular fashion. It just really doesn't serve that much of a purpose.
The big difference between nanomachines and macro machines is the components they're made out of. Machines today use all sorts of different parts, from chips to wires to metal plates. Nanomachines will, in some ways, be the equivalent of legos when compared. Because the atoms these machines are designed to manipulate are also the basic components of the machines themselves.
If we found a way to engineer all of today's machinery out of a set of "building blocks", it would be easy to imagine machines that can be programmed to put them together into any formation. A gear block here, a chip block here, a motor block here - but that would add a lot of time, engineering, and material overhead that isn't really considered necessary.
ever see a robot that could do anything really useful and complicated without constant supervision?
Last I was aware, there were come plants using robots that had a minimal number of people working during the day, and NONE at night. Working unsupervised. ---
On the global stage, the development of nuclear weapons is no doubt significant - without 'em the Cold War could have been very different.
I've heard it suggested (and am tempted to agree with) that the development of nuclear weapons has effectively prevented any large wars from taking place. That the reason that, say, the US and USSR never got into any actual war was because each country knew that it would likely lead to nuclear war, and that nobody really wanted to destroy most of civilization.
It's interesting to think that the same devices that caused so many people to live in fear for so long may have been the same ones that helped to keep people from getting killed. ---
Why not a list of the technologies that will shape the *next* century?
I think the problem with this is the increasing rate of technological development is leading to the future becoming more and more opaque. From what I understand, even many Science Fiction authors are upset by this, as they're realizing that it's getting to be too hard to put together both a believable future world and situations and characters peopel can understand and relate to.
Nanotechnology is one area which is going to create this obscurity. Zyvex and MIT are both predicting assemblers in the 10-15 year range now, due to the fact that progress is being made faster than anyone expected. If that alone happens, the rate at which it will mature makes it quite possible that by 2100 the world could be quite unrecognizable. And that's ignoring all the other technologies that will be developed.
Anyways, it always seems to be the tehnologies that are unexpected that make the most difference. Who in 1900 could have predicted the transistor/semiconductors would do so much to change things? ---
Another key issue for McGrath is the use of government resources, paid for by taxpayers, for personal matters, she said.
I wonder if the Representative has ever sent or received email from a family member while at the office...
Newsbreak: McGrath has decided to extend her bill for preventing the use of taxpayer money to pay for personal matters at universities. The amendments include: banning all televisions, radios, microwaves, and all other electronics other than desk lamps and non-radio alarm clocks, to prevent the use of taxpayer money paying for the electricity used for those newfangled "electronic devices". Firing all the food service people and distributing and government rations , since learning does not require students to have a variety of tasteful food. Disbanding all student organizations, as they use taxpayer resources (university buildings, land, and power) to support personal activites. And the telephones in the dormitories will be modified to allow calls only to school staff. When asked if she wanted to prohibit personal conversations between students, as they were using taxpayer air, she replied "hmmm... I'll have to consider that one."
She most obviously has no clue what the heck she is talking about. All the "personal" stuff has long been considered part of the college experience. It's part of the non-classroom learning and growing. Sure, the internet wasn't around before, but it is now, and it should be treated like any other service the school provides. They don't regulate the usage of the electricity or water, so why the information flow? ---
I think that one of the improvements we're going to see in games is more video, not CGI but actual video shots in video games. It'll start out slowly with just replacing still scenes with video clips, but eventually playing a video game is really going to be like being a part of a movie. People will look like real people, not like drawn characters. People will ACT not just stand in place. People will speak rather than make you read words on the screen.
If you're talking FMV with live actors, I think we've already seen that this just didn't work out so well. I'm not talking about the horrible "games" which were little more than movies with a minor bit of interaction. I'm talking the ones that tried to integrate live actors into the game...
It's just not the right medium for this. Games aren't SUPPOSED to be like movies. Movies are serial, uninteractive. Games are much more interactive, and often more parallel. The best adventure games, while having a story to rival a great movie, don't require you to do things in a specific order, working on one puzzle at a time.
And any game that tries to place you into the game as one of the characters is destroyed by using FMV. The Wing Commander series is a great example for me personally. I could feel at least partially that the character was me (though the gender was an obstacle). But when I started playing WC3, I felt like I was pulled completely out of the game. It was no longer a generic character to represent you. It was Mark Hamill playing Blair. I just can't feel like the character when it's another person playing it.
I think CGI animation is going to grow, because they're going to be able to do so much more with that environment than they could with real actors. And because they're not real people, those of us who like to really get into the character will still be able to do so. ---
Slashdot Mirror
I'm suprised that nobody has brought up either of two points I think are relevant to whether WOTC is embracing Open Gaming...
First, they took serious legal action against some people that were distributing new M:TG "cards" as stickers to be placed on top of old ones, as a private expansion set. I think they even uses different symbols for the mana, and backgrounds, but because they were obviously meant to be played with Magic, they went after them.
And WOTC actually has a patent(!) on many of their game mechanics. They've patented "tapping" a card, as in turning it sideways on the play area to indicate that it's been used. This is most definately NOT open...
---
The problem then goes back to that covered in the old GPL/BSD licensing debate.
What are you going to do about those corporations, who take what you make, make something better, feed that to your friends, and refuse to allow you to create from what they have made?
It's not really free if the corporations don't have the chance to use it also, of course. But they shouldn't have the right to borrow from what we did without letting us borrow from what they've done. They just have to understand that before they get involved - if so many other people can happy participate in that environment, then they can't use their bigger size to change the rules just so they can make their money.
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The government and companies are not going to try a different route as long as people keep making the purchases and paying attention. Do you think that Fox and Lucas are going to lighten up on the Star Wars copyrights and trademarks while people keep watching and buying the movies, buying the merchandise, and being rabid fans? They have no reason to. They can keep as much as possible to themselves without much of a penalty.
If you don't like it, stop buying it, stop watching it. Instead of writing fan fiction, get together with other people and create your own setting, that you can write about and do whatever you want with. There's no reason we can't have the equivalent of open source in that area. Why not try and make all those laws irrelevant?
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I'm no conspiracy theorist, but don't yout think that just maybe OPEC/the oil companies had more than a little part in holding back progress & discouraging innovation?
...or maybe I'm just bitter that gas prices are 72.9 cents a litre ($CAN) despite the fact that it's produced here in Alberta.
To be honest, I'm of split mind about the recent huge increase in gas prices. It's horrible having to spend to much to fill up the car, but perhaps if OPEC continues to use it's monopoly power to driver up prices, people will start to consider alternative fuel sources more seriously, instead of just as a novelty.
What better way to give feedback to OPEC then to tell them "no thanks, we don't need much oil anymore" and watch their fortunes (and maybe the political instability of the area) dry up due to greed.
---
I hope Intel and AMD continue their little battle - I'd love to see more companies get involved. After all, we're the ones that benefit from it from faster chips and cheaper prices.
Too bad car companies don't put as much effort into improving over each other instead of just advertising better - we'd be driving much safer and fuel efficient things...
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Please someone hack UFO: Enemy unknown so it's usable on anything higher that 486/33 or else I'll had to do it :)
Now if there ever was a game that needed to have the source code released, this is the one.
It would let us fix it so faster machines could run it, all the annoying bugs could be taken care of, and I'm sure there could be plenty of enhancements to give the game even more new life (net-play anyone)?
On that note... anyone want to start a write-in campaign to see if we can get them to release the source? After all, they've got the X-Com Commander's Pack (or whatever it's calle dout), and I'm sure that releasing the source would generate quite a few more sales of it for them, and if a lot of people wrote in and said "we'd buy it if...", perhaps they'd notice?
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Forgive me if I sound like a hopeless math luser, but how did you come to this number? 99.999% uptime tells me nothing. 99.999% of *what*? A year? A day? A nano-second?
The number he arrived at was using the time period of a year.
99.999% is rather general, but it's supposed to be. You want the product to spend 99.999% of the amount of time is trying to be used in a running state. If you're designing software that will only be run for an hour once a week, then spending that hour, even once, having the software not work will pretty much guarantee the software isn't 99.999% because of how long it takes to make up the downtime. How long? One hour of downtime required about 12 years of uptime to balance off.
It's EXTREMELY hard to do, because upgrades, maintenance, and even failures all have to be handled without the software going down.
---
I can't believe that I was the only one impressed with the appearance of Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes reprising their roles of Jay and Silent Bob. My friends and I seemed to be the only people in the theatre laughing at their cameo.
There does seem to be a lack of notice of who they were, but I caught it and found it quite funny...
---
I am not sure that your suggestion would be completely in the interests of the political candidate - these guys want to be all things to all people, and often that means keeping hush hush about some of the opinions they hold or may have had in the past. This would be more appropriate functionality for an independant politics website.
If one politician starts presenting the facts in that manner, then it could really hurt if the others don't do it. When one says "I've always been for so-and-so", and then can list every vote she's been in, and prove she's been for it, that could be a big help, especially against the "I've always been for it - but been voting against it" type people.
And honestly, I'd much rather see a politican that will admit their past and deal with it instead of hiding it.
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I am not normally one to followup my own posts, or question the moderation...
But in this case... I am totally stumped why this one would be considered offtopic? I know the moderator cannot respond, but maybe someone else who feels this way?
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The current political candidate sites seem to be little more than political rhetoric and volunteer information. Are there any plans to treat the website differently than a brodcast medium? I mean, including interactivity, such as message areas for open discussions, polling booths to get a feel for what people are really interested in. And also perhaps for offering large amounts of data about a candidate's past actions in government, such as voting records (and perhaps reasons for the vote).
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About 50% of the food in the US is gentetically modified and that probably means that yes, your pizza is.
Ummm... I'd be willing to be almost all of the food we eat is genetically modified in some way. You think the tomatoes grown today were like that a couple thousand years ago? Heck, so are our pets, and our children. It's called "selective breeding" - carefully choosing which plants/animals mate to enhance certain characteristics. It's all in an effort to modify the genetics.
The only difference with genetic engineering is that they skip the whole breeding step and just change the DNA to start with. The breeding is just as likely to cause harmful characteristics as the engineering.
---
There is a REASON that /. lets you turn off certain subjects so you don't see them.
But I continue to see the same people, time after time, replying to Katz's writings just to flame. You help make some of his points for him.
I just don't get it anymore. It's like any other Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder. But instead of washing your hands 5 times in a row, or constantly checking the rooms to make sure the lights are turned off, you're unable to resist reading the story and repeating the same old anti-Katz rhetoric. It almost seems like someone wrote a Katz-flame generator, the comments are so unoriginal.
Is there some purpose to the constant flaming? Can you give us some reason why it does anything other than annoy the rest of us?
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Yes, human brain is just a result of evolution; yes, there is no ultimate purpose; but to leap from that to 'there can be no consciousness in a pourely material Universe without god' is simply an idiotic appeal to personal incredulity of an uneducated religious fool who cannot conceive of themselves as not being special.
I'll be glad to see when technology and science can finally give us an answer to this question. After all, if an artificial consciousness can be created, it demonstrates the lack of any "spark" given to a biological being, of any "soul".
Heck emergent behavior currently being exhibited in neural nets kind of suggests that consciousness is just something that results from a complex set of elements that influence each other and change over time.
---
s it only me who thinks that assuming consciousness is a human-only trait is just a little bit arrogant? I see no evidence in any of my scientific training to suggest that consciousness is limited to the human experience - in fact having watched numerous stunning nature programs (thanks BBC :-) ) I'd say consciousness was a far more widespread condition than we give it credit for.
I remember hearing something once that if you look at the size of the brain (or was it ratio of size of brain to size of animal... I forget which) and compare it to the demonstrated intelligence, it seems to form a very accurate measure. If you look at this throughout the entire animal kindgom, it seems to hold true. But that, with this system, humans only achieve the #2 spot - dolphins are number one on this scale. It is interesting to wonder if the only reason that we humans made civilization was because of being on land and being able to manipulate objects, and that dolphins are the smarter ones...
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You might want to check out the propinball series for PC. The next best thing to owning your own.
I was going to mention them also...
And the best thing is - not only do they provide a very convincing simulation of a real pinball machine (down to the ball hitting the glass), but the tables are well designed tables. Timeshock! would make a very good real machine.
Though it still can't quite replicate the experience of actually playing on a real machine. I know I'm picking up a machine or two as soon as I live somewhere with the room. (So sad that Williams has stopped making pinball machines - they've always made the very best ones)
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Six sigma... now there is a tedious thing to go through. :-) ISO-900x just guarantees you have documented everything you do; six sigma is the practicality of ISO -- six failures in every million.
:)
Hmmm... you know, maybe that's what the Justice Department could do to penalize Microsoft. Require them to implement the Six Sigma program there, and get all their products compliant. Considering the current state of their software, it would either destroy them when they couldn't do it, or at least slow and bog their releases so much that other companies can somewhat catch up.
As it is now, they're, what, point-six sigma?
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If you produce a self-reproducing nanomachine and release it into the wild, you loose all ability to control it (ultimately). It immediately falls under the perview of natural selection and evolution. You can put your finger in and affect little bits of if but you cannot control the thing as a whole. Even if you had strong control over the replication process, random error will work to evolve nanomachines, as a subset of the whole mass, that are no longer under your control.
There are a number of methods that can be implemented to attempt to keep this sort of thing from happening.
First of all, self-replicating nanomachines may not need to be commonplace - we may be able to get away with ONLY having assemblers doing the construction/replication, and never build this ability into anything else.
Second, we can implement various checks to help prevent it. Require a nanomachine to compare itself with x neighbors before it can duplicate itself. If it stores instructions in itself somewhere, then make it two sets stored in different locations (maybe in different ways), and if the two do not match exactly, self destruct. In any group of "wild" replicators, require a certain percentage of them to be police nanomachines, checking the others for flaws.
It's true that no method can prevent it from ever happening, but we can make it so unlikely as to rest at ease.
And we can always just create the instructions and structures in ways that any "mutation" will be much more likely to make it non-operational.
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I dinged my car yesterday. It has a flaw now. I dinged my toe on the coffe table two days ago. I am not flawed anymore.
You misunderstood me on this point.
Sure, you have temporary flaws from minor injuries. But no amount of healing is going to fix the flaws in the "design" of your body. Your blood vessels will never move from in front of your retina to behind, increasing your vision. Your urethra will never stop going through your prostate (yes, a collapsable tube running through an organ that has a tendency to expand). And check the Talk.Origins web site for plenty more examples of these kinds of flaws in living creatures.
Nature is not perfect. Far from it.
f you think we can do better with metal and silicon than nature has done with carbohydrates and proteins, I would be suprised.
Do nuclear weapons count? I think they're a tad more effective. And there's always the black goo/grey goo scenarios, that if they were to occur, could quite possibly destroy ALL life on (and in) the planet, rendering it completely uninhabitable.
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On a side note, does anyone really believe that nanotech is that amazing? Look at your cells. Nature has been there and done that, probably more efficiently than we will ever be able to do it.
Yes, nature does things quite efficiently. But not even near optimal.
The nervous system in our body uses electrical impulses to transmit the sensory data. But that's not even close to the speed at which computers transmit their data.
The bones in our body grow and are alive, so they can't possibly have the strength of the "skeletons" we use for cars and buildings.
We can already do some things better than nature ever could. Evolution isn't going to bother making something optimal if it doesn't really deliver a substantial benefit. It doesn't even guarantee there won't be any serious flaws - most living things, in fact, have these "flaws".
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have you ever seen a macro device that even comes close to doing this? ever see a robot that could build a copy of itself from basic parts?
There is no reason why this couldn't be built, assuming that the robot was designed in a more modular fashion. It just really doesn't serve that much of a purpose.
The big difference between nanomachines and macro machines is the components they're made out of. Machines today use all sorts of different parts, from chips to wires to metal plates. Nanomachines will, in some ways, be the equivalent of legos when compared. Because the atoms these machines are designed to manipulate are also the basic components of the machines themselves.
If we found a way to engineer all of today's machinery out of a set of "building blocks", it would be easy to imagine machines that can be programmed to put them together into any formation. A gear block here, a chip block here, a motor block here - but that would add a lot of time, engineering, and material overhead that isn't really considered necessary.
ever see a robot that could do anything really useful and complicated without constant supervision?
Last I was aware, there were come plants using robots that had a minimal number of people working during the day, and NONE at night. Working unsupervised.
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On the global stage, the development of nuclear weapons is no doubt significant - without 'em the Cold War could have been very different.
I've heard it suggested (and am tempted to agree with) that the development of nuclear weapons has effectively prevented any large wars from taking place. That the reason that, say, the US and USSR never got into any actual war was because each country knew that it would likely lead to nuclear war, and that nobody really wanted to destroy most of civilization.
It's interesting to think that the same devices that caused so many people to live in fear for so long may have been the same ones that helped to keep people from getting killed.
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Why not a list of the technologies that will shape the *next* century?
I think the problem with this is the increasing rate of technological development is leading to the future becoming more and more opaque. From what I understand, even many Science Fiction authors are upset by this, as they're realizing that it's getting to be too hard to put together both a believable future world and situations and characters peopel can understand and relate to.
Nanotechnology is one area which is going to create this obscurity. Zyvex and MIT are both predicting assemblers in the 10-15 year range now, due to the fact that progress is being made faster than anyone expected. If that alone happens, the rate at which it will mature makes it quite possible that by 2100 the world could be quite unrecognizable. And that's ignoring all the other technologies that will be developed.
Anyways, it always seems to be the tehnologies that are unexpected that make the most difference. Who in 1900 could have predicted the transistor/semiconductors would do so much to change things?
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Another key issue for McGrath is the use of government resources, paid for by taxpayers, for personal matters, she said.
I wonder if the Representative has ever sent or received email from a family member while at the office...
Newsbreak: McGrath has decided to extend her bill for preventing the use of taxpayer money to pay for personal matters at universities. The amendments include: banning all televisions, radios, microwaves, and all other electronics other than desk lamps and non-radio alarm clocks, to prevent the use of taxpayer money paying for the electricity used for those newfangled "electronic devices". Firing all the food service people and distributing and government rations , since learning does not require students to have a variety of tasteful food. Disbanding all student organizations, as they use taxpayer resources (university buildings, land, and power) to support personal activites. And the telephones in the dormitories will be modified to allow calls only to school staff. When asked if she wanted to prohibit personal conversations between students, as they were using taxpayer air, she replied "hmmm... I'll have to consider that one."
She most obviously has no clue what the heck she is talking about. All the "personal" stuff has long been considered part of the college experience. It's part of the non-classroom learning and growing. Sure, the internet wasn't around before, but it is now, and it should be treated like any other service the school provides. They don't regulate the usage of the electricity or water, so why the information flow?
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I think that one of the improvements we're going to see in games is more video, not CGI but actual video shots in video games. It'll start out slowly with just replacing still scenes with video clips, but eventually playing a video game is really going to be like being a part of a movie. People will look like real people, not like drawn characters. People will ACT not just stand in place. People will speak rather than make you read words on the screen.
If you're talking FMV with live actors, I think we've already seen that this just didn't work out so well. I'm not talking about the horrible "games" which were little more than movies with a minor bit of interaction. I'm talking the ones that tried to integrate live actors into the game...
It's just not the right medium for this. Games aren't SUPPOSED to be like movies. Movies are serial, uninteractive. Games are much more interactive, and often more parallel. The best adventure games, while having a story to rival a great movie, don't require you to do things in a specific order, working on one puzzle at a time.
And any game that tries to place you into the game as one of the characters is destroyed by using FMV. The Wing Commander series is a great example for me personally. I could feel at least partially that the character was me (though the gender was an obstacle). But when I started playing WC3, I felt like I was pulled completely out of the game. It was no longer a generic character to represent you. It was Mark Hamill playing Blair. I just can't feel like the character when it's another person playing it.
I think CGI animation is going to grow, because they're going to be able to do so much more with that environment than they could with real actors. And because they're not real people, those of us who like to really get into the character will still be able to do so.
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