There's an onion article on this, but whenever I go by radio shack, I wonder how on earth they stay in business. The shops tend to be small, with various corners full of obscure electronics components. Yet, they also attempt to sell computers and televisions from these tiny shops. Everything they have in the parts drawer or on the shelves you can get cheaper off of ebay, often at half the cost or less. Radio shack is fundamentally inefficient. Each of these little shops has an inventory that sits there and depreciates, requires employees to tend, bills and management, etc. Internet mail order shops via ebay and other mechanisms is a lot more cost effective method for delivering high value specialty goods. I mean, I've seen CPU coolers and power supplies at radio shack : hello, newegg?
Have you ever yanked an electric meter? I have.
It takes all of 30 seconds.
Step 1 : Cut the seal
Step 2 : loosen a set screw
Step 3 : pull the meter
Electric meters pull out and plug back in just like a giant plug. It would not take long to swap in a smart meter. And the meter could communicate back to the power substation using the same wire it is connected to - the power line. Already a technique in common use.
Actually, the OP is correct. Modern games with a recent graphics card are bottlenecked by the CPU. Specifically, GTA 4 needs a monstrously powerful CPU in order for the engine to draw the city at a decent framerate. This is probably a result of poor programming by the folks that ported the game, but in any case you need a beefy CPU to enjoy GTA4.
Uh, you can use liquid hydrogen, which is in unlimited supply. Only reason they use helium is that it gets slightly colder and that it is slightly safer. MRIs using liquid hydrogen will need a more robust emergency ventilation system to get the explosive gas out of the building safely (maybe theyll put them in freestanding structures next to hospitals) but will work as normal.
I don`t get where this meme is coming from. Ive seen it mentioned lots of places...the kooky idea that robots and computer software will soon be doing SURGERY.
Out of all the jobs on this planet, surgery is going to be one of the last ones replaced by automation. Nearly every other form of employment is easier to automate. Surgery is a series of delicate, deliberately chosen steps that requires an enormous pool of knowledge and experience to do successfully. Surgeons go through more years of training than any other job on the planet. The actual physical motions and dexterity have little to do with what makes it difficult : as the Dean of my medical school said, surgery is about knowing when to operate, not doing the procedure itself.
Yes, telepresence bots are used to hold some of the instruments...but that in no way even slightly reduces the need for an educated professional at the controls of the robot.
You aren't bothering with any of these problems. You use pulse lasers, and you don't build an engine for the spacecraft. You simple bolt the payload to a block of inert metal. That's it. The inert metal block with the spacecraft on top starts on top of a big tower. Your laser array is timed in pulses : the first pulses vaporizes a little jet of metal, the second one is timed to create a planar shockwave that produces thrust. No control chamber, nothing. In theory the system could work with just sensors on the ground that would monitor the position and orientation of the spacecraft as it accelerates vertically (the spacecraft accelerates at 90 degrees with respect to the launch site all the way until it reaches orbit, you can reach orbit around the earth without flying 'sideways') and absolutely nothing on the spacecraft but the block of metal. More realistically, the spacecraft would have a simple sensor package, gyroscopes, control vanes, and sensors in the block of metal to measure ablation, and would transmit telemetry to the ground. Still, in an abort scenario you just turn off the lasers, fire explosive bolts to separate from the metal block, and deploy a parachute - no need to worry about the rocket exploding.
The spacecraft could use a vasimir engine for maneuvers once in orbit.
Anyways, there's a presentation made every few years on this idea, and there's slideshows you can view with a quick google search.
The way laser launch works is that the laser vaporizes a block of propellant strapped to the bottom of the rocket. In principle, the rocket could use absolutely no aerospace hardware at all. It would cost about 5 billion to buy enough laser modules for small satellites, and mabye 100 billion to be able to launch a space shuttle load of gear every time.
Google for it. But the basic advantages are
1. The complicated hardware is left resting on the earth. Aerospace hardware isnt needed.
2. The lasers dont have to withstand vibration or launch stresses, and can be any arbitrary size. They can be massively redundant as well. You can use them over and over again.
The system would be a lot simpler and a lot cheaper than anything we have today. Once in orbit, a spacecraft would need some other kind of thruster for getting around, but the orbital insertion itself would be caused by a single large laser array with no mirrors except in the laser modules.
But we will develop the technology to put things into orbit cheaply. We already have developed the basics : LED pumped, fiber optic lasers. The money being wasted on manned missions right now should go to developing a better launch mechanism. Even a giant factory to mass produce Saturn Vs would be better than what we have now. However, I think it's time for laser launch.
And no, I don't think the space elevator is an idea that will ever come : the problem is the enormous cost of constructing the cable, made using theoretical materials, before you can launch even a gram. A single break anywhere in the cable, and you lose your entire investment. Not to mention that a space elevator would be slow, and you can only start lifting one load at a time to avoid straining the cable too much. Laser launch would let you cheaply blast payload after payload, every hour day and night, without any appreciable wear on the LED lasers in the laser array. (and if a few of the laser modules were to burn out, you could simply turn on hot spares while you are servicing the broken ones)
All the discussions about the space program overlook a critical fact. It costs about $10,000 a kilogram or more to lift anything into low earth orbit. That means that the entire manned space program is virtually useless : there's no point in learning how to put people into space and have them survive if no affordable way for a lot of people and supplies to go into space exists. If every kilo costs 10 grand, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to send robots and equipment into space than to send people. Even repairing Hubble never made any sense : it would have been a lot cheaper to build a brand new telescope every time than to pay for each repair mission.
The only way a moon base or a space station or a space hotel or anything else will ever be practical is if that launch cost is reduced through new technology. Personally, out of all the proposals I've ever seen, only one new technology makes the slightest bit of sense : laser launch.
First, any realistic Mars spacecraft is probably going to have megawatts of power from nuclear generators. The power would be used to run CASIMIR plasma engines. While this will make the spacecraft more complex, it would greatly shorten the length of the mission and increase the amount of supplies and spare parts the spacecraft could carry.
Second, no matter how they build the spacecraft, they'll need enough juice to run radios, heaters, fans, air conditioners, lighting, and tons of other equipment. A few watts from a video decoding device and a few OLED displays is not going to break the energy budget.
It wouldn't be too difficult to pack a few hard drives or SSDs with a few thousand movies and episodes of TV shows. Ironically, while it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy all those DVDs and rip them, it would cost a lot more money to send the media holding the video files to mars. There would be a lengthy time-lag for emails, but that's little different than email is already.
Laser launch would easily be less than $100 per kilogram. Go wiki it yourself. Basically, its a huge array of LED or other cheap laser modules that heat the underside of the spacecraft. The cheapest method uses pulse lasers, and the spacecraft can be merely an inert lump of metal bolted to the payload. In principle, the spacecraft would need absolutely no aerospace hardware at all - no computers, guidance systems, thrusters, nothing, and it could be inserted into orbit.
A laser launch system would be able to make a launch every hour, all day and all night, and as such the cost per launch would approach that of the cost of electricity for running the lasers. Using current prices from LED laser merchants, ít would cost several billion dollars for a cargo laser system, and about 100 billion worth of lasers to duplicate the per launch payload capacity of the space shuttle.
A system like this could send tens of thousands of people into space, and all the mass needed to build the habitats needed to house them.
Interventional cardiologists and other physician specialties already use a veritable swiss army knife of tools on catheter tips. You already can feed all sorts of balloons and stents and scrapers and other tools into the body by pushing them into place with a catheter. This "robot" is moved around with a magnetic field rather than a plastic filament.
I wonder what new techniques and procedures this will make possible...and if the incremental improvement in outcomes will actually extend lifespans any...
This may be the future of gaming, eventually supplanting console and PC gaming.
Reasons :
1. This is a DRM system that would be nearly impossible to beat. As long as the game code is only given to these hosts, it would be vastly more difficult to pirate games. Not impossible - workers at the hosting company could leak the game to the internet, but it would be much more difficult.
Strong DRM means the publishers would get paid for every game they sell, yet they could easily offer fully functional 'demos' of the game, or sell time for a game. It might be easier for a lesser known publisher to sell 10 hours of a game for $10 than the entire game for $50.
2. It removes the need for the users to buy expensive hardware, whether that be a console or a high end gaming PC. You instead just lease time on the big iron. More advanced games with more advanced graphics would become available much sooner, since publishers wouldn't have to wait for the next generation of console to become common with consumers, or for PC owners to finally get upgrade their graphics cards. A publisher could offer games with state of the art, photo realistic graphics much sooner : it would just cost more per hour to play a game like that.
3. It solves the nightmare of hardware incompatibility and hardware failures. Since your netbook/living room console/old PC would merely be decoding video, there would be far fewer ways things could go wrong.
Problems : using flash is not a long term solution, flash has many problems : later generations of this service will need their own, optimized decoder code. ISPs will have to work with the companies offering hosted games, and configure their networks to deliver the ultra low latency, guaranteed bandwidth needed for a gaming session to actually work.
I think this idea is going to take off. It'll be a few years before ISPs really get their act together to support this kind of service, but it will gradually happen, and I think it will completely supplant the game console.
Every fossil fuel burned in the world releases CO2 into the atmosphere. While CO2 is obviously not a particularly toxic pollutant, in overwhelmingly vast quantities it probably will eventually cause problems. No, plants don't remove CO2 - when a plant dies, the decay process re-releases most of the CO2 right back into the atmosphere. If global CO2 levels ever rise to the point that the gas is causing serious problems, the only fix will be a process like this one.
Collecting all the CO2 released when it was burned the first time will cost a lot of money - that's why it makes sense to tax fossil fuels and to invest the money in clean energy technology and save some for a cleanup program. A tax would charge uses of fossil fuels for the "negative externality" - the cost incurred by others to clean up all that CO2 and the damage resulting from it.
In any case, climate change won't be all doom and gloom, at least for high technology societies that can react to the changes. Some day, we'll have vast numbers of CO2 scrubbers like these 'trees', powered by nuclear or solar energy.
What is the 3d chip in the iphone capable of doing? More specifically, how does it compare to the power of an older console like the playstation 2? John Carmack has stated that he thinks Quake 3 could be ported to the iphone : is this really possible?
New technology becomes widespread when it makes it easier for human beings to accomplish the same task with less human labor, or to accomplish a new goal that meets human desires. That's why we work to invent technology.
The internet makes it possible now for basically everyone who was a news subscriber before to get their information from any source they can send a web browser to, instead of just dead tree products. Right now, there are more news outlets and news writers than there are people willing to pay for them. Hard fact.
A lot of people blame the greasy feel of newsprint, or Craiglist, or the current advertising crash, or things they don't like about the local newspaper. That isn't the problem. Right now, the market has too many sellers.
How's it going to end up? I don't know. One interesting fact I found is that for specific, timely information about a specific subject, nothing beats an online message board. For researching my whole path to medical school, residency, and beyond I spent hundreds of hours on the "studentdoctor.net" forums, and I learned more frank information than any book or news article about becoming a physician could have ever taught me.
Ditto for say, learning how to tune a computer for maximum performance, or how to properly install an SSD.
Maybe the news outlets of the future will be identity verified online forums where local citizens discuss local city news. Everyone will receive electronic versions of just the big, world famous newspapers (aka Wall street Journal/New York Times) on devices like the kindle.
One quote from the article really stood out. It kind of bothers me.
" The former Army colonel was quite clear on his opinion of that matter. "If you're working with the enemy, that's called treason. The jihadist killing our people today would love to get a larger audience to perpetrate their hate."
This is precisely the same argument that is being kicked back and forth over the torture photos. Basically, the colonel is saying it's treason to even ask the insurgents why they are trying to kill us. He's also saying it's treason to ask them why they stayed and fought in Fallujah against the world's most powerful military.
That, despite the fact that these people are willing to kill themselves to fight us, we can't even publish what they're thinking that leads them to this.
From a military perspective, propaganda is important to winning wars. It's evidently the correct strategy to tell lies and half truths about your enemy in order to incite your side into fighting. But we have plenty of American troops willing to fight - the problem is that it doesn't seem to be accomplishing anything.
An immune system doesn't care if the invaders have good intentions or not - they fight off anyone who doesn't belong. We're a foreign body to these people, and they feel they have to fight us off.
How's that? If you're a new player, you'll be doing drudgery like mining rocks for a year or so until you get accumulate enough skillpoints and wealth to do anything. (unless you buy a character, of course)
In fact, in Eve online, new players today enter a world where big player alliances already have the mega-uber ships and the players getting to fly those super-ships have years of experience playing the game. In Eve, you can't even grind to "catch up" - it takes a fixed amount of real world time before your character's skills are developed into anything useful for the hyper-competitive world of the pk.
And there's not even a new server being opened up from time to time to give new players a chance to play on an equal game footing with old players.
I thought of a solution to the "game pausing" problem.
When you organize into a team for the "month long game of Warcraft 3", you choose playing hours. So, you might "sign up" for a game where everyone will play from 6pm to 10pm each day, central standard time. Or any arbitrary set of times, obviously this would mean that most of the time, you'd be playing with other people from your time zone.
This would make the game more intense : every second actually playing the game would be precious, because if you just stand around, other players on the other teams would be beating you to the quests. Obviously, there would be some randomization : the statistics on weapons and abilities would change randomly a little bit with each match, and the locations of the dungeons and stuff would also change. It would also be possible to play on a "map" that was custom made by other players.
And if you're a casual player, you could sign up for a "3 days a week, 1 hour" match where you only play a total of 3 hours a week. None of your competitors would have any more time than you, or be ahead at the from the start.
As for the 1 month expiration date on your powers : have you ever noticed how the most fun part of any new MMORPG is that level up during the newbie levels? The game stops being as much fun once it starts taking forever to level up. And you can't PK until you finish the chore of getting to the top level.
In my vision of a game, you could obviously go try to gank someone on the other team at level 1.
Oh, a side note - if you don't log in, your character is still in the game world, wherever you left him. Your faction would have some kind of headquarters, so the ideal spot to leave a character for the night would be asleep in his/her bed in the big castle. You'd get a well rested bonus the next game day if you did that.
I thought of a solution to the "game pausing" problem.
When you organize into a team for the "month long game of Warcraft 3", you choose playing hours. So, you might "sign up" for a game where everyone will play from 6pm to 10pm each day, central standard time. Or any arbitrary set of times, obviously this would mean that most of the time, you'd be playing with other people from your time zone.
This would make the game more intense : every second actually playing the game would be precious, because if you just stand around, other players on the other teams would be beating you to the quests. Obviously, there would be some randomization : the statistics on weapons and abilities would change randomly a little bit with each match, and the locations of the dungeons and stuff would also change. It would also be possible to play on a "map" that was custom made by other players.
And if you're a casual player, you could sign up for a "3 days a week, 1 hour" match where you only play a total of 3 hours a week. None of your competitors would have any more time than you, or be ahead at the from the start.
As for the 1 month expiration date on your powers : have you ever noticed how the most fun part of any new MMORPG is that level up during the newbie levels? The game stops being as much fun once it starts taking forever to level up. And you can't PK until you finish the chore of getting to the top level.
In my vision of a game, you could obviously go try to gank someone on the other team at level 1.
If there are millions of people playing on the same server, this would have the OPPOSITE effect. Your actions would be so diluted as to be meaningless. Bosses might take hundreds or thousands of players working together to kill - which means that if you decide to call it a night or watch sports and log out early, your team would barely notice your absence.
Nearly all MMORPGs are the same game. The point of the game is to make you, a single human being among millions in a society you can't change, FEEL POWERFUL. When humans were cave men, living in small groups of under 100 people, a single person WAS powerful. Your actions actually would affect whether the tribe got enough to eat, or who got to reproduce.
Now, unless you're that rare 1 in 300 million who is the President, you have very little power.
So, I thought of the opposite game : the MMORPG world would be broken up into shards with less than 50 people on each. There would be thousands of NPC characters. Each shard would start a new "round" every month or two, and when you are playing, your single character's actions would have PROFOUND effects on the landscape. You could lead a huge army of thousands of characters. Every corpse would stay on the battlefield. If you burn a tree or strucuture or a whole forest down, it stays burnt down. And so on.
You'd start each round as a "level 1" and over the course of a month could rapidly level up to godlike powers - but you've got to compete against the other 30 players who started at the same time at the beginning of the month at the same level as you. You'd be organized into factions, and of course the goal would be conquest of the entire world of the shard. If you solved a quest and got the phat loot, no one else could solve that quest - the uber weapon would be yours and the boss would be dead.
In such a world, permanent death could be semi-practical. The way it would work, only an extremely high level character would be able to permanently kill another character, and it would take a few weeks to get to that high of a level.
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There's an onion article on this, but whenever I go by radio shack, I wonder how on earth they stay in business. The shops tend to be small, with various corners full of obscure electronics components. Yet, they also attempt to sell computers and televisions from these tiny shops. Everything they have in the parts drawer or on the shelves you can get cheaper off of ebay, often at half the cost or less. Radio shack is fundamentally inefficient. Each of these little shops has an inventory that sits there and depreciates, requires employees to tend, bills and management, etc. Internet mail order shops via ebay and other mechanisms is a lot more cost effective method for delivering high value specialty goods. I mean, I've seen CPU coolers and power supplies at radio shack : hello, newegg?
Have you ever yanked an electric meter? I have. It takes all of 30 seconds. Step 1 : Cut the seal Step 2 : loosen a set screw Step 3 : pull the meter Electric meters pull out and plug back in just like a giant plug. It would not take long to swap in a smart meter. And the meter could communicate back to the power substation using the same wire it is connected to - the power line. Already a technique in common use.
Actually, the OP is correct. Modern games with a recent graphics card are bottlenecked by the CPU. Specifically, GTA 4 needs a monstrously powerful CPU in order for the engine to draw the city at a decent framerate. This is probably a result of poor programming by the folks that ported the game, but in any case you need a beefy CPU to enjoy GTA4.
Uh, you can use liquid hydrogen, which is in unlimited supply. Only reason they use helium is that it gets slightly colder and that it is slightly safer. MRIs using liquid hydrogen will need a more robust emergency ventilation system to get the explosive gas out of the building safely (maybe theyll put them in freestanding structures next to hospitals) but will work as normal.
I don`t get where this meme is coming from. Ive seen it mentioned lots of places...the kooky idea that robots and computer software will soon be doing SURGERY.
Out of all the jobs on this planet, surgery is going to be one of the last ones replaced by automation. Nearly every other form of employment is easier to automate. Surgery is a series of delicate, deliberately chosen steps that requires an enormous pool of knowledge and experience to do successfully. Surgeons go through more years of training than any other job on the planet. The actual physical motions and dexterity have little to do with what makes it difficult : as the Dean of my medical school said, surgery is about knowing when to operate, not doing the procedure itself.
Yes, telepresence bots are used to hold some of the instruments...but that in no way even slightly reduces the need for an educated professional at the controls of the robot.
You aren't bothering with any of these problems. You use pulse lasers, and you don't build an engine for the spacecraft. You simple bolt the payload to a block of inert metal. That's it. The inert metal block with the spacecraft on top starts on top of a big tower. Your laser array is timed in pulses : the first pulses vaporizes a little jet of metal, the second one is timed to create a planar shockwave that produces thrust. No control chamber, nothing. In theory the system could work with just sensors on the ground that would monitor the position and orientation of the spacecraft as it accelerates vertically (the spacecraft accelerates at 90 degrees with respect to the launch site all the way until it reaches orbit, you can reach orbit around the earth without flying 'sideways') and absolutely nothing on the spacecraft but the block of metal. More realistically, the spacecraft would have a simple sensor package, gyroscopes, control vanes, and sensors in the block of metal to measure ablation, and would transmit telemetry to the ground. Still, in an abort scenario you just turn off the lasers, fire explosive bolts to separate from the metal block, and deploy a parachute - no need to worry about the rocket exploding.
The spacecraft could use a vasimir engine for maneuvers once in orbit.
Anyways, there's a presentation made every few years on this idea, and there's slideshows you can view with a quick google search.
The way laser launch works is that the laser vaporizes a block of propellant strapped to the bottom of the rocket. In principle, the rocket could use absolutely no aerospace hardware at all. It would cost about 5 billion to buy enough laser modules for small satellites, and mabye 100 billion to be able to launch a space shuttle load of gear every time.
Google for it. But the basic advantages are
1. The complicated hardware is left resting on the earth. Aerospace hardware isnt needed.
2. The lasers dont have to withstand vibration or launch stresses, and can be any arbitrary size. They can be massively redundant as well. You can use them over and over again.
The system would be a lot simpler and a lot cheaper than anything we have today. Once in orbit, a spacecraft would need some other kind of thruster for getting around, but the orbital insertion itself would be caused by a single large laser array with no mirrors except in the laser modules.
But we will develop the technology to put things into orbit cheaply. We already have developed the basics : LED pumped, fiber optic lasers. The money being wasted on manned missions right now should go to developing a better launch mechanism. Even a giant factory to mass produce Saturn Vs would be better than what we have now. However, I think it's time for laser launch.
And no, I don't think the space elevator is an idea that will ever come : the problem is the enormous cost of constructing the cable, made using theoretical materials, before you can launch even a gram. A single break anywhere in the cable, and you lose your entire investment. Not to mention that a space elevator would be slow, and you can only start lifting one load at a time to avoid straining the cable too much. Laser launch would let you cheaply blast payload after payload, every hour day and night, without any appreciable wear on the LED lasers in the laser array. (and if a few of the laser modules were to burn out, you could simply turn on hot spares while you are servicing the broken ones)
For Hubble? I recall it cost about a billion to make the first one. Presumably, cheaper copies could have been built, and launched using rockets.
All the discussions about the space program overlook a critical fact. It costs about $10,000 a kilogram or more to lift anything into low earth orbit. That means that the entire manned space program is virtually useless : there's no point in learning how to put people into space and have them survive if no affordable way for a lot of people and supplies to go into space exists. If every kilo costs 10 grand, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to send robots and equipment into space than to send people. Even repairing Hubble never made any sense : it would have been a lot cheaper to build a brand new telescope every time than to pay for each repair mission.
The only way a moon base or a space station or a space hotel or anything else will ever be practical is if that launch cost is reduced through new technology. Personally, out of all the proposals I've ever seen, only one new technology makes the slightest bit of sense : laser launch.
First, any realistic Mars spacecraft is probably going to have megawatts of power from nuclear generators. The power would be used to run CASIMIR plasma engines. While this will make the spacecraft more complex, it would greatly shorten the length of the mission and increase the amount of supplies and spare parts the spacecraft could carry. Second, no matter how they build the spacecraft, they'll need enough juice to run radios, heaters, fans, air conditioners, lighting, and tons of other equipment. A few watts from a video decoding device and a few OLED displays is not going to break the energy budget.
It wouldn't be too difficult to pack a few hard drives or SSDs with a few thousand movies and episodes of TV shows. Ironically, while it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy all those DVDs and rip them, it would cost a lot more money to send the media holding the video files to mars. There would be a lengthy time-lag for emails, but that's little different than email is already.
Laser launch would easily be less than $100 per kilogram. Go wiki it yourself. Basically, its a huge array of LED or other cheap laser modules that heat the underside of the spacecraft. The cheapest method uses pulse lasers, and the spacecraft can be merely an inert lump of metal bolted to the payload. In principle, the spacecraft would need absolutely no aerospace hardware at all - no computers, guidance systems, thrusters, nothing, and it could be inserted into orbit.
A laser launch system would be able to make a launch every hour, all day and all night, and as such the cost per launch would approach that of the cost of electricity for running the lasers. Using current prices from LED laser merchants, ít would cost several billion dollars for a cargo laser system, and about 100 billion worth of lasers to duplicate the per launch payload capacity of the space shuttle.
A system like this could send tens of thousands of people into space, and all the mass needed to build the habitats needed to house them.
This is where NASAs budget should go.
Interventional cardiologists and other physician specialties already use a veritable swiss army knife of tools on catheter tips. You already can feed all sorts of balloons and stents and scrapers and other tools into the body by pushing them into place with a catheter. This "robot" is moved around with a magnetic field rather than a plastic filament.
I wonder what new techniques and procedures this will make possible...and if the incremental improvement in outcomes will actually extend lifespans any...
This may be the future of gaming, eventually supplanting console and PC gaming.
Reasons :
1. This is a DRM system that would be nearly impossible to beat. As long as the game code is only given to these hosts, it would be vastly more difficult to pirate games. Not impossible - workers at the hosting company could leak the game to the internet, but it would be much more difficult.
Strong DRM means the publishers would get paid for every game they sell, yet they could easily offer fully functional 'demos' of the game, or sell time for a game. It might be easier for a lesser known publisher to sell 10 hours of a game for $10 than the entire game for $50.
2. It removes the need for the users to buy expensive hardware, whether that be a console or a high end gaming PC. You instead just lease time on the big iron. More advanced games with more advanced graphics would become available much sooner, since publishers wouldn't have to wait for the next generation of console to become common with consumers, or for PC owners to finally get upgrade their graphics cards. A publisher could offer games with state of the art, photo realistic graphics much sooner : it would just cost more per hour to play a game like that.
3. It solves the nightmare of hardware incompatibility and hardware failures. Since your netbook/living room console/old PC would merely be decoding video, there would be far fewer ways things could go wrong.
Problems : using flash is not a long term solution, flash has many problems : later generations of this service will need their own, optimized decoder code. ISPs will have to work with the companies offering hosted games, and configure their networks to deliver the ultra low latency, guaranteed bandwidth needed for a gaming session to actually work.
I think this idea is going to take off. It'll be a few years before ISPs really get their act together to support this kind of service, but it will gradually happen, and I think it will completely supplant the game console.
Every fossil fuel burned in the world releases CO2 into the atmosphere. While CO2 is obviously not a particularly toxic pollutant, in overwhelmingly vast quantities it probably will eventually cause problems. No, plants don't remove CO2 - when a plant dies, the decay process re-releases most of the CO2 right back into the atmosphere. If global CO2 levels ever rise to the point that the gas is causing serious problems, the only fix will be a process like this one.
Collecting all the CO2 released when it was burned the first time will cost a lot of money - that's why it makes sense to tax fossil fuels and to invest the money in clean energy technology and save some for a cleanup program. A tax would charge uses of fossil fuels for the "negative externality" - the cost incurred by others to clean up all that CO2 and the damage resulting from it.
In any case, climate change won't be all doom and gloom, at least for high technology societies that can react to the changes. Some day, we'll have vast numbers of CO2 scrubbers like these 'trees', powered by nuclear or solar energy.
What is the 3d chip in the iphone capable of doing? More specifically, how does it compare to the power of an older console like the playstation 2? John Carmack has stated that he thinks Quake 3 could be ported to the iphone : is this really possible?
This website says the movie wrapped production in 2007....
New technology becomes widespread when it makes it easier for human beings to accomplish the same task with less human labor, or to accomplish a new goal that meets human desires. That's why we work to invent technology.
The internet makes it possible now for basically everyone who was a news subscriber before to get their information from any source they can send a web browser to, instead of just dead tree products.
Right now, there are more news outlets and news writers than there are people willing to pay for them. Hard fact.
A lot of people blame the greasy feel of newsprint, or Craiglist, or the current advertising crash, or things they don't like about the local newspaper. That isn't the problem. Right now, the market has too many sellers.
How's it going to end up? I don't know. One interesting fact I found is that for specific, timely information about a specific subject, nothing beats an online message board. For researching my whole path to medical school, residency, and beyond I spent hundreds of hours on the "studentdoctor.net" forums, and I learned more frank information than any book or news article about becoming a physician could have ever taught me.
Ditto for say, learning how to tune a computer for maximum performance, or how to properly install an SSD.
Maybe the news outlets of the future will be identity verified online forums where local citizens discuss local city news. Everyone will receive electronic versions of just the big, world famous newspapers (aka Wall street Journal/New York Times) on devices like the kindle.
One quote from the article really stood out. It kind of bothers me.
" The former Army colonel was quite clear on his opinion of that matter.
"If you're working with the enemy, that's called treason. The jihadist killing our people today would love to get a larger audience to perpetrate their hate."
This is precisely the same argument that is being kicked back and forth over the torture photos. Basically, the colonel is saying it's treason to even ask the insurgents why they are trying to kill us. He's also saying it's treason to ask them why they stayed and fought in Fallujah against the world's most powerful military.
That, despite the fact that these people are willing to kill themselves to fight us, we can't even publish what they're thinking that leads them to this.
From a military perspective, propaganda is important to winning wars. It's evidently the correct strategy to tell lies and half truths about your enemy in order to incite your side into fighting. But we have plenty of American troops willing to fight - the problem is that it doesn't seem to be accomplishing anything.
An immune system doesn't care if the invaders have good intentions or not - they fight off anyone who doesn't belong. We're a foreign body to these people, and they feel they have to fight us off.
How's that? If you're a new player, you'll be doing drudgery like mining rocks for a year or so until you get accumulate enough skillpoints and wealth to do anything. (unless you buy a character, of course)
In fact, in Eve online, new players today enter a world where big player alliances already have the mega-uber ships and the players getting to fly those super-ships have years of experience playing the game. In Eve, you can't even grind to "catch up" - it takes a fixed amount of real world time before your character's skills are developed into anything useful for the hyper-competitive world of the pk.
And there's not even a new server being opened up from time to time to give new players a chance to play on an equal game footing with old players.
Grinding might be more fun if "team evil" were actually trying to stop you from getting something, and controlled by other players.
I thought of a solution to the "game pausing" problem.
When you organize into a team for the "month long game of Warcraft 3", you choose playing hours. So, you might "sign up" for a game where everyone will play from 6pm to 10pm each day, central standard time. Or any arbitrary set of times, obviously this would mean that most of the time, you'd be playing with other people from your time zone.
This would make the game more intense : every second actually playing the game would be precious, because if you just stand around, other players on the other teams would be beating you to the quests. Obviously, there would be some randomization : the statistics on weapons and abilities would change randomly a little bit with each match, and the locations of the dungeons and stuff would also change. It would also be possible to play on a "map" that was custom made by other players.
And if you're a casual player, you could sign up for a "3 days a week, 1 hour" match where you only play a total of 3 hours a week. None of your competitors would have any more time than you, or be ahead at the from the start.
As for the 1 month expiration date on your powers : have you ever noticed how the most fun part of any new MMORPG is that level up during the newbie levels? The game stops being as much fun once it starts taking forever to level up. And you can't PK until you finish the chore of getting to the top level.
In my vision of a game, you could obviously go try to gank someone on the other team at level 1.
Oh, a side note - if you don't log in, your character is still in the game world, wherever you left him. Your faction would have some kind of headquarters, so the ideal spot to leave a character for the night would be asleep in his/her bed in the big castle. You'd get a well rested bonus the next game day if you did that.
I thought of a solution to the "game pausing" problem.
When you organize into a team for the "month long game of Warcraft 3", you choose playing hours. So, you might "sign up" for a game where everyone will play from 6pm to 10pm each day, central standard time. Or any arbitrary set of times, obviously this would mean that most of the time, you'd be playing with other people from your time zone.
This would make the game more intense : every second actually playing the game would be precious, because if you just stand around, other players on the other teams would be beating you to the quests. Obviously, there would be some randomization : the statistics on weapons and abilities would change randomly a little bit with each match, and the locations of the dungeons and stuff would also change. It would also be possible to play on a "map" that was custom made by other players.
And if you're a casual player, you could sign up for a "3 days a week, 1 hour" match where you only play a total of 3 hours a week. None of your competitors would have any more time than you, or be ahead at the from the start.
As for the 1 month expiration date on your powers : have you ever noticed how the most fun part of any new MMORPG is that level up during the newbie levels? The game stops being as much fun once it starts taking forever to level up. And you can't PK until you finish the chore of getting to the top level.
In my vision of a game, you could obviously go try to gank someone on the other team at level 1.
If there are millions of people playing on the same server, this would have the OPPOSITE effect. Your actions would be so diluted as to be meaningless. Bosses might take hundreds or thousands of players working together to kill - which means that if you decide to call it a night or watch sports and log out early, your team would barely notice your absence.
Nearly all MMORPGs are the same game. The point of the game is to make you, a single human being among millions in a society you can't change, FEEL POWERFUL. When humans were cave men, living in small groups of under 100 people, a single person WAS powerful. Your actions actually would affect whether the tribe got enough to eat, or who got to reproduce.
Now, unless you're that rare 1 in 300 million who is the President, you have very little power.
So, I thought of the opposite game : the MMORPG world would be broken up into shards with less than 50 people on each. There would be thousands of NPC characters. Each shard would start a new "round" every month or two, and when you are playing, your single character's actions would have PROFOUND effects on the landscape. You could lead a huge army of thousands of characters. Every corpse would stay on the battlefield. If you burn a tree or strucuture or a whole forest down, it stays burnt down. And so on.
You'd start each round as a "level 1" and over the course of a month could rapidly level up to godlike powers - but you've got to compete against the other 30 players who started at the same time at the beginning of the month at the same level as you. You'd be organized into factions, and of course the goal would be conquest of the entire world of the shard. If you solved a quest and got the phat loot, no one else could solve that quest - the uber weapon would be yours and the boss would be dead.
In such a world, permanent death could be semi-practical. The way it would work, only an extremely high level character would be able to permanently kill another character, and it would take a few weeks to get to that high of a level.