Sci-Fi utilizes so many mediums, it would be remiss to miss out on them. Especially with such modern greats like Banks, Gibson, & Stross operating just outside the realms occupied by The Classics.
Try to find a Mod out there - one with a team who is actually building something - and pitch them a few missions, maybe a story vision.
It's a little different writing well for a game, because you need to have you're fleshed out story-arc, which meshes with the gameplay, which can be brought in often enough that it moves the story forward, all without annoying the user. You're not writing a Novel, remember...:)
You'll probably get turned down at first at a lot of places (lots of people want to help with mods, but can't code/model, so they try to be writers...), but if you're actually any good then you'll find a crew.
Losing a ship (even a pod, if you don't go overboard) is just not that big a deal. New players learn this with time. If they stick around, stop complaining and stay diligent, they will get beyond the hump and reach a point of success.
Everything can be bounced back from. Went a little too far into 0.0? oops... Grind a little, buy another BS, and don't make the same mistake again.
Someday they're going to get walking in stations implemented; and I'm never going to make money in the real world again...:)
What about a streaming, high resolution simulation of the entirety of Paris, France?
The P4 can't quite do that. Maybe in a few years...
Just like computing power; if bandwidth becomes "essentially limitless", we will still find a way to use it to the limit. Energy, food, science, philosophy, etc. As the base infrastructure improves, so does the grandiosity of that which can be built upon it.
Interoperability is the interesting part for me. Graphics can be upgraded, but if there is a simple standard available for me to connect my online persona with many different online worlds, that begins to change things.
Host your own servers, do your own stuff, invite who you want, go to other places on a whim (just type the address), visit other people, etc. I remember how bad websites were in the early 90's. Tacky animated gifs, horrible images... this is the second life of today. With time, standards, practices, and tools development, there is no reason SL type experiences won't improve much like websites have.
- DaftShadow
p.s. Keep an eye on OpenCroquet too. Not as much press, but Alan Kay et all are working diligently. They are approaching the idea of 3D mass-experience from a slightly different perspective, which has a lot of potential. I'm not a big squeak fan, but I have been intrigued with what I have seen.
I have the same issue with the Firefox AwesomeBar. It's a great idea, with huge practical potential. But until I can control it for privacy purposes, I willingly sacrifice my firefox experience by turning off the entire bar.
If the devs would add the simple functionality such that I could tag a bookmark as "ignore this", I would be appeased. It is the fact that they have not done this yet that is turning me to considering another solution like Opera or Webkit. The solution is easy to solve, yet seemingly impossible to grasp...
I thought that too at first, and then I "got" it: Right now, every website I go to, I create a new account. New account, new password, new entry in my passmanager. I usually use the same login name/user name, for simplicity's sake. You probably do this also.
Now, I can use OpenID to stop dealing with my passmanager! I can get the same login name everywhere. If I want the simple route, I simply use diggity.myopenid.com. If I want the advanced "I control it all" route, then I can host it myself using phpMyID (although that makes it a fair bit less anonymous:).
The best part though, and I think this is where you are confused, is that you can create as many OpenIDs, using as many providers, as you want to keep track of! You could have ten different logins to Slashdot if you wanted. You can have that already right now, but OpenID allows you to take this the extra step and take any of these logins with you to any other site in the future. If you want extra security, you can use a provider in a foreign country that deletes all logs, never tracks IPs, and understands full deniability. Whatever. This is totally up to you!.
Men and Women of humanity are driven to accomplish the amazing. We all have this dream, in some form. Space is the next wild frontier in the expansion of humanity, and as such, it inspires millions upon millions of people. Every human since the birth of humanity has looked at the night sky and said "wow..."
Energy, Education, and Poverty are not yet bad enough to hit people in their motivation. If it does get there, then it will be solved (although, I believe it will be solved much earlier). But space is not a broken window, it is a dream.
I will continue to dream about the possibilities of the future, and not dote on the uninspired. This is how we build our future.
I think you may be right. And honestly, I think it's great!
12 years of programming experience, marketing experience, leadership experience, training experience, mean that you can probably "produce" better than your younger competitors. It's not always true, but mostly.
So, rather than taking someone and giving them a 2% raise every year for the rest of their life, you pay what they are "worth." If someone gets older and can't do as much work, they get passed by in the pay department. If someone is too young, and can't produce as much as the experienced people, then pay them less. It's a more honest, and more "incentive-based" system. It's the type of business ethic that has led America to be a world powerhouse for the last century and a half.
What drives me nuts are the smart, hard-working, successful businessmen who believe that we should "protect" American industries with high tariffs, or that we should kick out all the "illegals," or other such nonsense. They are happy to get rich and take advantage of the capitalism which built the society they so enjoy, but when push comes to shove they willingly give in to their own irrationality.
Throughout the entire history of the world, it has been seen that most people will quickly compromise everything they know to be true in order to protect their personal power/status/riches. Rich or Poor, there are very few human beings who will take the risk of supporting their beliefs.
It always heartens me to see a generation giving these bastards the finger.:)
You may have little patience for people who demand more than they are worth; but this generation has absolutely no patience for companies unwilling to engage them at market value.
It's simple economics. If a key employee thinks that he is worth $X salary, you evaluate whether or not he's worth it. If he is, you pay it. If not worth it, you don't. That's it. These people are not quitting to go work at McDonalds, they are finding other work that pays them what they want.
The 'retention' problem is not because this generation wants the kitchen sink; it's because these companies don't have any money to buy kitchens.
Add ten years to your scenario, and then re-evaluate your question. The costs and challenges involved in manufacturing are continuing to decrease. Automation and Adaptability in the Manufacturing industries are increasing. Right now there are Open Source fabs which can take your CAD instructions and produce tangible objects. Automation is the cutting edge of manufacturing.
It's not too far-fetched to believe that very soon there will be strong "on-demand" production facilities that have a completely automated start-to-finish process. I put together CAD designs, send them to a Mfg, who produces a run at a 'fair' price and then ships it to me. Open Source Hardware Hacking is merely a step on this path.
Think of all the amazingly cool products we could open up to the world if producing your "dream product" was a simple as learning to use Autodesk Inventor!
That's actually a great point. The reason that this idea works is because we are only interested in incorrect MD5 hashes. Any incorrect hash means the domain is available.
Although, I would still have to stand by the earlier recommendations of salting it. Make it as brute-force challenging for the squatters as possible.:)
This is an opportunity for a smart Google leader to step up and drive the way towards greater personal control. One of the things that plagues soooo many sites, social sites, wikis, etc etc etc, is the concept of "double-tier" information access: 1) Publicly visible, 2) Not.
But life isn't like that, and there is no reason that users should be forced into those two simple camps.
If Google stepped up and became one of the first major "social" sites to offer fine-grained privacy and sharing controls, it would find itself a very unique feature with a lot of potential customer draw.
Problem two is what happens to the line technicians when you automate their jobs. Because realistically they're not all going to be moving to research-level tasks. Most of them won't be anything like smart enough.
A great point. I still don't have a complete answer to this yet, although I have some ideas that I can expand upon. I should note first that all the 'line technicians' in the USA account for only 2% of the job force. That being said, GEM consortium has research showing that entrepreneurial activity increases in areas of high unemployment, especially when there is a lot of other economic activity/wealth. Problem is the lag-time between unemployment and the eventual creation of new employment. This lag-time hurts, especially for those people who are unemployed.
I believe that we need to focus a lot of attention on retraining and cross-training of our blue-collar workforce. The economic benefits of whole-scale automation/robotics are obvious, but if these benefits arrive and 50% of our society is out of work or shifted to very low wage employment (conservative estimate, long term), consumer spending disappears pretty instantly and the whole balance shifts. So we need to put in place the capacities to help shift the vast majority of our workforce into the Services sector.
Second, I believe that we need to come up with a better way of sharing the profits of society. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing, and full-scale automation will only contribute to this. If we are unable to accomplish the workforce transition fairly quickly, and the economic gap shifts significantly enough, there will be mass resentment and quite probably insurrection. So we need to head this off by providing and preparing a fair system to keep the balance of society intact. With the possibilities of production capacity that a future society may hold, and the fact that the population is expected by many to begin leveling off, it seems quite likely that there is no reason an unemployed person 50-100 years from now cannot be as 'production-rich' as an average employed individual in today's society.
If every engineer was a "Henry Ford", we could develop fully automated robotic production systems, on the cheap, that would completely do away with the need for line technicians. We would also be able to put huge amounts of brain power on challenges like solving cheap propulsion, cheap non-polluting energy, and full-bore space travel.
Making the claim that engineers need to be by-the-book, follow orders types, is quite disingenuous. They are like that right now, and look what is happening to our engineering/production/manufacturing industries!
The more engineers that we have who are smart, creative, entrepreneurial, and capable, the better off our entire society will be. Smart engineers can always learn to do 'dumb' engineering; it's a fair bit harder to go the other way.
One of the key ways that money is made is by disrupting the status quo. Take something that is good, and make it much better. Take something that is thought of as important, and replace it completely. Think of every great product that you know - the kind of products that changed everything how people live and work. The hammer, the wheel, the model-T, the plow, the longbow, the musket, the steam engine, the computer, automated mfg, the internet. Hell, even simple things, like the ipod. These creations have improved the possibilities of the human experience (except, maybe, the ipod;). This is what Olin college is attempting to inspire.
Industry is floundering because it has stopped giving engineers and creative types the responsibility of actual creation. If we, as a society, wish to bring engineering and manufacturing back to our side of the world, we need colleges and programs like the ones that Olin is taking on. We need engineers who will develop & create beyond our expectations. This is important to the future success of America.
Slashdot Mirror
Upvoted. :)
Sci-Fi utilizes so many mediums, it would be remiss to miss out on them. Especially with such modern greats like Banks, Gibson, & Stross operating just outside the realms occupied by The Classics.
- DaftShadow
I wish more people would record from this perspective as well. POV is a great way to watch action sports.
Check out some Base-Jumping vids for a great rush.
Try to find a Mod out there - one with a team who is actually building something - and pitch them a few missions, maybe a story vision.
:)
It's a little different writing well for a game, because you need to have you're fleshed out story-arc, which meshes with the gameplay, which can be brought in often enough that it moves the story forward, all without annoying the user. You're not writing a Novel, remember...
You'll probably get turned down at first at a lot of places (lots of people want to help with mods, but can't code/model, so they try to be writers...), but if you're actually any good then you'll find a crew.
Good Luck!
Losing a ship (even a pod, if you don't go overboard) is just not that big a deal. New players learn this with time. If they stick around, stop complaining and stay diligent, they will get beyond the hump and reach a point of success.
:)
Everything can be bounced back from. Went a little too far into 0.0? oops... Grind a little, buy another BS, and don't make the same mistake again.
Someday they're going to get walking in stations implemented; and I'm never going to make money in the real world again...
- DaftShadow
What about a streaming, high resolution simulation of the entirety of Paris, France?
The P4 can't quite do that. Maybe in a few years...
Just like computing power; if bandwidth becomes "essentially limitless", we will still find a way to use it to the limit. Energy, food, science, philosophy, etc. As the base infrastructure improves, so does the grandiosity of that which can be built upon it.
DaftShadow
Interoperability is the interesting part for me. Graphics can be upgraded, but if there is a simple standard available for me to connect my online persona with many different online worlds, that begins to change things.
Host your own servers, do your own stuff, invite who you want, go to other places on a whim (just type the address), visit other people, etc. I remember how bad websites were in the early 90's. Tacky animated gifs, horrible images... this is the second life of today. With time, standards, practices, and tools development, there is no reason SL type experiences won't improve much like websites have.
- DaftShadow
p.s. Keep an eye on OpenCroquet too. Not as much press, but Alan Kay et all are working diligently. They are approaching the idea of 3D mass-experience from a slightly different perspective, which has a lot of potential. I'm not a big squeak fan, but I have been intrigued with what I have seen.
...which he describes as set "in a [...] world"
:)
There, that's better.
Fixed that for you.
I, and many others, missed the live stream. If someone could hook up the rest of us with the landing video footage, that would be awesome!
- DaftShadow
Check out X-Plane MARS and test some designs for yourself. :)
Image Here
From this website
I have the same issue with the Firefox AwesomeBar. It's a great idea, with huge practical potential. But until I can control it for privacy purposes, I willingly sacrifice my firefox experience by turning off the entire bar.
If the devs would add the simple functionality such that I could tag a bookmark as "ignore this", I would be appeased. It is the fact that they have not done this yet that is turning me to considering another solution like Opera or Webkit. The solution is easy to solve, yet seemingly impossible to grasp...
- DaftShadow
"Soulja Boy Tell Em TV" is good shit. Check it out.
I thought that too at first, and then I "got" it: Right now, every website I go to, I create a new account. New account, new password, new entry in my passmanager. I usually use the same login name/user name, for simplicity's sake. You probably do this also.
:).
Now, I can use OpenID to stop dealing with my passmanager! I can get the same login name everywhere. If I want the simple route, I simply use diggity.myopenid.com. If I want the advanced "I control it all" route, then I can host it myself using phpMyID (although that makes it a fair bit less anonymous
The best part though, and I think this is where you are confused, is that you can create as many OpenIDs, using as many providers, as you want to keep track of! You could have ten different logins to Slashdot if you wanted. You can have that already right now, but OpenID allows you to take this the extra step and take any of these logins with you to any other site in the future. If you want extra security, you can use a provider in a foreign country that deletes all logs, never tracks IPs, and understands full deniability. Whatever. This is totally up to you!.
- DaftShadow
It's rigged. No one actually *chooses* the CowboyNeal option.
"Lack of Motivation."
Men and Women of humanity are driven to accomplish the amazing. We all have this dream, in some form. Space is the next wild frontier in the expansion of humanity, and as such, it inspires millions upon millions of people. Every human since the birth of humanity has looked at the night sky and said "wow..."
Energy, Education, and Poverty are not yet bad enough to hit people in their motivation. If it does get there, then it will be solved (although, I believe it will be solved much earlier). But space is not a broken window, it is a dream.
I will continue to dream about the possibilities of the future, and not dote on the uninspired. This is how we build our future.
- DaftShadow
I think you may be right. And honestly, I think it's great!
12 years of programming experience, marketing experience, leadership experience, training experience, mean that you can probably "produce" better than your younger competitors. It's not always true, but mostly.
So, rather than taking someone and giving them a 2% raise every year for the rest of their life, you pay what they are "worth." If someone gets older and can't do as much work, they get passed by in the pay department. If someone is too young, and can't produce as much as the experienced people, then pay them less. It's a more honest, and more "incentive-based" system. It's the type of business ethic that has led America to be a world powerhouse for the last century and a half.
- DaftShadow
What drives me nuts are the smart, hard-working, successful businessmen who believe that we should "protect" American industries with high tariffs, or that we should kick out all the "illegals," or other such nonsense. They are happy to get rich and take advantage of the capitalism which built the society they so enjoy, but when push comes to shove they willingly give in to their own irrationality.
:)
Throughout the entire history of the world, it has been seen that most people will quickly compromise everything they know to be true in order to protect their personal power/status/riches. Rich or Poor, there are very few human beings who will take the risk of supporting their beliefs.
It always heartens me to see a generation giving these bastards the finger.
- DaftShadow
You may have little patience for people who demand more than they are worth; but this generation has absolutely no patience for companies unwilling to engage them at market value.
It's simple economics. If a key employee thinks that he is worth $X salary, you evaluate whether or not he's worth it. If he is, you pay it. If not worth it, you don't. That's it. These people are not quitting to go work at McDonalds, they are finding other work that pays them what they want.
The 'retention' problem is not because this generation wants the kitchen sink; it's because these companies don't have any money to buy kitchens.
- DaftShadow
Add ten years to your scenario, and then re-evaluate your question. The costs and challenges involved in manufacturing are continuing to decrease. Automation and Adaptability in the Manufacturing industries are increasing. Right now there are Open Source fabs which can take your CAD instructions and produce tangible objects. Automation is the cutting edge of manufacturing.
It's not too far-fetched to believe that very soon there will be strong "on-demand" production facilities that have a completely automated start-to-finish process. I put together CAD designs, send them to a Mfg, who produces a run at a 'fair' price and then ships it to me. Open Source Hardware Hacking is merely a step on this path.
Think of all the amazingly cool products we could open up to the world if producing your "dream product" was a simple as learning to use Autodesk Inventor!
- DaftShadow
That's actually a great point. The reason that this idea works is because we are only interested in incorrect MD5 hashes. Any incorrect hash means the domain is available.
:)
Although, I would still have to stand by the earlier recommendations of salting it. Make it as brute-force challenging for the squatters as possible.
- DaftShadow
This is an opportunity for a smart Google leader to step up and drive the way towards greater personal control. One of the things that plagues soooo many sites, social sites, wikis, etc etc etc, is the concept of "double-tier" information access: 1) Publicly visible, 2) Not.
But life isn't like that, and there is no reason that users should be forced into those two simple camps.
If Google stepped up and became one of the first major "social" sites to offer fine-grained privacy and sharing controls, it would find itself a very unique feature with a lot of potential customer draw.
- DaftShadow
Problem two is what happens to the line technicians when you automate their jobs. Because realistically they're not all going to be moving to research-level tasks. Most of them won't be anything like smart enough.
A great point. I still don't have a complete answer to this yet, although I have some ideas that I can expand upon. I should note first that all the 'line technicians' in the USA account for only 2% of the job force. That being said, GEM consortium has research showing that entrepreneurial activity increases in areas of high unemployment, especially when there is a lot of other economic activity/wealth. Problem is the lag-time between unemployment and the eventual creation of new employment. This lag-time hurts, especially for those people who are unemployed.
I believe that we need to focus a lot of attention on retraining and cross-training of our blue-collar workforce. The economic benefits of whole-scale automation/robotics are obvious, but if these benefits arrive and 50% of our society is out of work or shifted to very low wage employment (conservative estimate, long term), consumer spending disappears pretty instantly and the whole balance shifts. So we need to put in place the capacities to help shift the vast majority of our workforce into the Services sector.
Second, I believe that we need to come up with a better way of sharing the profits of society. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing, and full-scale automation will only contribute to this. If we are unable to accomplish the workforce transition fairly quickly, and the economic gap shifts significantly enough, there will be mass resentment and quite probably insurrection. So we need to head this off by providing and preparing a fair system to keep the balance of society intact. With the possibilities of production capacity that a future society may hold, and the fact that the population is expected by many to begin leveling off, it seems quite likely that there is no reason an unemployed person 50-100 years from now cannot be as 'production-rich' as an average employed individual in today's society.
- DaftShadow
If every engineer was a "Henry Ford", we could develop fully automated robotic production systems, on the cheap, that would completely do away with the need for line technicians. We would also be able to put huge amounts of brain power on challenges like solving cheap propulsion, cheap non-polluting energy, and full-bore space travel.
Making the claim that engineers need to be by-the-book, follow orders types, is quite disingenuous. They are like that right now, and look what is happening to our engineering/production/manufacturing industries!
The more engineers that we have who are smart, creative, entrepreneurial, and capable, the better off our entire society will be. Smart engineers can always learn to do 'dumb' engineering; it's a fair bit harder to go the other way.
- DaftShadow
One of the key ways that money is made is by disrupting the status quo. Take something that is good, and make it much better. Take something that is thought of as important, and replace it completely. Think of every great product that you know - the kind of products that changed everything how people live and work. The hammer, the wheel, the model-T, the plow, the longbow, the musket, the steam engine, the computer, automated mfg, the internet. Hell, even simple things, like the ipod. These creations have improved the possibilities of the human experience (except, maybe, the ipod ;). This is what Olin college is attempting to inspire.
Industry is floundering because it has stopped giving engineers and creative types the responsibility of actual creation. If we, as a society, wish to bring engineering and manufacturing back to our side of the world, we need colleges and programs like the ones that Olin is taking on. We need engineers who will develop & create beyond our expectations. This is important to the future success of America.
- DaftShadow
We don't have atheists like in your country... we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this.