Some of us who were born before the Internet remember that about 10 years ago a guy named George Gobleposted a video of himself pouring LOX on lit charcoal. He claimed that a pre-saturated charcoal briquette
had the equivalent explosive power of a stick of dynamite.
Great idea, but there can be problems. Not just technically, but morally and ethically. These guys should read Neuromancer and find out how Dixie Flatline felt about existing in a ROM chip after he was dead.
The Rio Grande used to bring water to Mexico, which it no longer does do to consumption in southern California - part of the reason in fact that many Mexicans now come north to farm.
Good question. The right solution would be to integrate two tiny cameras with the goggles and provide augmented reality, such that the goggles simply project what you would see anyway, with augmentations. Then you can toss your prescription glasses because the goggles would do that job. And if the cameras could autofocus closeup as well as far, the bifocals you would otherwise need when you got older would be unnecessary as well.
requiring babies to be born with immature brains and women to have problematically wide hips),
Don't forget how we breathe through the same tube we eat through. Oh yeah, there's a good idea. Dolphins figured out the right solution to that problem what, a million years ago? We are at best beta code. I suspect even Microsoft could design a better human.
Another thing I find odd is that the dog's immune system doesn't recognize these cells as foreign and attack them; one of the reasons that your own immune system has trouble attacking your own cancer cells is because they're identical to the host's. OTOH, they say the cancer isn't fatal in dogs, so it's quite possible that the immune system does limit it's development.
The link (above) on Tasmanian Devil cancer says that in the case of that species, the lack of genetic diversity caused by inbreeding in the wild has made the cancer unrecognizable as "foreign" to the animals' immune systems. I suspect this would rule out a similar mechanism for cancer transmission in humans, except perhaps in Alabama.
Neal Armstrong is pretty firmly in the permanent record.
He is for now, but Neal Armstrong is a meme, and memes can change depending on what records get preserved. Of all the media you mentioned, only the paper books (and under ideal circumstances, maybe the LP albums) have a chance of being readable after a few hundred years. It's because of those books that I worry less about Armstrong's legacy than about, say, history's view of the causes of the current Iraq war, because most of the documentation for the latter is probably not on paper.
We are idiots, setting ourselves up for an information disaster. Go read A Canticle for Leibowitz for a sobering take on the possible consequences of this.
...each of which is removeable and replaceable (including Dashboard, the Finder, Spotlight, Safari, the Dock, etc.)
Well...you didn't mention how easy it was to remove or replace any of them. Safari is certainly easy to avoid. But the rest are pretty heavily hardwired into OSX.
Dashboard is probably the second easiest to kill, or replace with Konfabulator. The awful OSX Finder can be replaced with Pathfinder which is finally starting to work like the Finder should have all along, but it took years of work for a company to figure out how to do it, when the Finder should have included enough hooks to make it easy for lots of companies to add functionality without replacing the whole thing monolithically. The Dock can now be fairly effectively eliminated and replaced with half a dozen different methods, but again, it took years for the community to figure out how to kill that damn bastard piece of software in a clean way. Steve Jobs' biggest flaw is that he doesn't understand the difference between cool shiny stuff and productivity software. His second biggest flaw is that he thinks his way is the only correct way, and users shouldn't be allowed to get rid of his shiny babies and replace them with useful tools.
If you know how to remove and replace Spotlight and return to previous Finder file searching capability (one of the few good things about the 10.3 Finder), would you be so kind as to inform those of us who think Spotlight is the Spawn of Satan?
P.S. I know about EasyFind . It's a stopgap. It's not as good as the 10.3 find function and it doesn't bind to Cmd-F.
I remember books. Back in my day books were made of paper, and you could
read them any time you wanted--even lend them to a friend. Not like these "books" today with their
fancy OLED screens that self-destruct exactly 30 days after you buy them, with their built-in GPS
that sounds a silent alarm if they're moved more than 10 miles from the point of purchase, and that built-in microphone so if they hear you reading
the contents out loud, the men with guns and body armor show up at your
house in 5 minutes.
Twice in one day, Google shows their fat middle finger to a bunch of splooge-sucking weasels. Okay Google, we take it back. You're not becoming Microsoft. We love you again.
It's not really their fault; it's because we don't have a memory technology
that's all three of:
A. Nonvolatile
B. Cheap per byte
C. Fast
Hard disks are A and B; RAM is C. Flash is the only thing we have that is
sort of all three, but it's not yet cheap enough or fast enough. Eventually, we'll
develop a technology that has all three attributes and the distinction will go away.
Bill: Hey, we're introducing this great new music download service!
Record Company Executive: Great! Does it work on iPods?
Bill: Errr... not exactly.
RCE: Well, then, uh, Bill, you know you're my number one guy, right? Why don't you just let yourself out and I'll get back to you real soon. We'll do lunch, 'kay?
Good list. I noticed that nothing you mentioned above had anything to do with the creation of music. Which will probably prove true for Microsoft's efforts as well.
Great description. Thanks. Not being a physicist, I had the same initial thought: How can this work if everything is being stretched/squished at the same time?
And then I remembered: It's not just space that's getting distored; it's time too. Let me try to restate what you said, just to see if I've got it right. Speed is distance over time. The only way c can remain constant is for both distance and time to be distorted equally. That was Einstein's key insight in 1905 when he thought up SR. So in this device, c stays constant, and perhaps even more important, the frequency of the photons never changes (if it did their energy would change and conservation would be violated) so photon interference will be able to measure the effect in question.
Right?
The cachet of a respectable name
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 1
Calling this company "AT&T" is as funny and sad as calling the present-day Hewlett-Packard corporation, well, Hewlett-Packard.
Slashdot Mirror
That was our YouTube. And we liked it.
Great idea, but there can be problems. Not just technically, but morally and ethically. These guys should read Neuromancer and find out how Dixie Flatline felt about existing in a ROM chip after he was dead.
Bravo. Well-said.
Dashes? You had dashes? You had it easy. We only had dots. And we liked it!
What is this 'Florida' you speak of?
Good question. The right solution would be to integrate two tiny cameras with the goggles and provide augmented reality, such that the goggles simply project what you would see anyway, with augmentations. Then you can toss your prescription glasses because the goggles would do that job. And if the cameras could autofocus closeup as well as far, the bifocals you would otherwise need when you got older would be unnecessary as well.
I suspect Col. Frank Slade could really get behind this.
...and therefore it can't be called "carbon-free" until they eliminate the x86 instruction set too.
I take it you didn't RTFA. It specifically addresses this point. Short answer: Yes.
He is for now, but Neal Armstrong is a meme, and memes can change depending on what records get preserved. Of all the media you mentioned, only the paper books (and under ideal circumstances, maybe the LP albums) have a chance of being readable after a few hundred years. It's because of those books that I worry less about Armstrong's legacy than about, say, history's view of the causes of the current Iraq war, because most of the documentation for the latter is probably not on paper.
We are idiots, setting ourselves up for an information disaster. Go read A Canticle for Leibowitz for a sobering take on the possible consequences of this.
Whoa. Suddenly I hear Won't Get Fooled Again playing in my head.
Well...you didn't mention how easy it was to remove or replace any of them. Safari is certainly easy to avoid. But the rest are pretty heavily hardwired into OSX. Dashboard is probably the second easiest to kill, or replace with Konfabulator. The awful OSX Finder can be replaced with Pathfinder which is finally starting to work like the Finder should have all along, but it took years of work for a company to figure out how to do it, when the Finder should have included enough hooks to make it easy for lots of companies to add functionality without replacing the whole thing monolithically. The Dock can now be fairly effectively eliminated and replaced with half a dozen different methods, but again, it took years for the community to figure out how to kill that damn bastard piece of software in a clean way. Steve Jobs' biggest flaw is that he doesn't understand the difference between cool shiny stuff and productivity software. His second biggest flaw is that he thinks his way is the only correct way, and users shouldn't be allowed to get rid of his shiny babies and replace them with useful tools.
If you know how to remove and replace Spotlight and return to previous Finder file searching capability (one of the few good things about the 10.3 Finder), would you be so kind as to inform those of us who think Spotlight is the Spawn of Satan?
P.S. I know about EasyFind . It's a stopgap. It's not as good as the 10.3 find function and it doesn't bind to Cmd-F.
I remember books. Back in my day books were made of paper, and you could read them any time you wanted--even lend them to a friend. Not like these "books" today with their fancy OLED screens that self-destruct exactly 30 days after you buy them, with their built-in GPS that sounds a silent alarm if they're moved more than 10 miles from the point of purchase, and that built-in microphone so if they hear you reading the contents out loud, the men with guns and body armor show up at your house in 5 minutes.
We had books made of paper. And we LIKED IT!
Strangely enough, the actual last word on the black-box recorder was "Uhoh". NASA has put together an excellent page documenting the accident.
1. Do not talk about Mac vulnerabilities.
2. DO NOT TALK ABOUT MAC VULNERABILITIES.
Twice in one day, Google shows their fat middle finger to a bunch of splooge-sucking weasels. Okay Google, we take it back. You're not becoming Microsoft. We love you again.
- A. Nonvolatile
- B. Cheap per byte
- C. Fast
Hard disks are A and B; RAM is C. Flash is the only thing we have that is sort of all three, but it's not yet cheap enough or fast enough. Eventually, we'll develop a technology that has all three attributes and the distinction will go away.Bill: Hey, we're introducing this great new music download service!
Record Company Executive: Great! Does it work on iPods?
Bill: Errr... not exactly.
RCE: Well, then, uh, Bill, you know you're my number one guy, right? Why don't you just let yourself out and I'll get back to you real soon. We'll do lunch, 'kay?
Good list. I noticed that nothing you mentioned above had anything to do with the creation of music. Which will probably prove true for Microsoft's efforts as well.
And then I remembered: It's not just space that's getting distored; it's time too. Let me try to restate what you said, just to see if I've got it right. Speed is distance over time. The only way c can remain constant is for both distance and time to be distorted equally. That was Einstein's key insight in 1905 when he thought up SR. So in this device, c stays constant, and perhaps even more important, the frequency of the photons never changes (if it did their energy would change and conservation would be violated) so photon interference will be able to measure the effect in question.
Right?
Calling this company "AT&T" is as funny and sad as calling the present-day Hewlett-Packard corporation, well, Hewlett-Packard.
And here I was wondering why the crew of Serenity spoke so much Chinese. Thanks for clearing that up.