Yeah, I know, its an oxymoron. Sadly never more than today. Our government has too many secrets. Too many bodies buried. Too many skeletons in the closet. The secrets its keeping are not in your best interest, or they'd share them with you. No, the only way to keep government in check is with transparency. When an employee of the government see's gross negligence, naked aggression, illegal activities, or profound betrayals of the Constitution or the American People, they are honor bound to make that information public, and any attempt to stop them is itself a crime against the nation. More, they should be treated as heroes, not black listed and hung out to dry or worse prosecuted.
Time after time we hear of some government atrocity, a person of impeccable integrity looks to get redress for the perceived wrong, and is basically told its none of his business not once but time after time. Finally he has nobody left in government to speak to so he tell the media. At which point they either remains anonymous, or they get crucified.
Now they tell us we can all be proud that our government has so wisely spent hundreds of millions of our tax dollars to plug up those nasty leaks and keep those rotten secrets, secret. Isn't that wonderful, now we can all enjoy the benefits of plausible deniability, while our rogue government bombs brown people for oil on behalf of Exxon-Mobil.
Folks, this might be a fine time to howl at your representatives... you know, the folks who are supposed to represent us? Let them know how we feel about government transparency. We're all in this together, and if what Government is doing is obscene, immoral or just plain illegal, there's a good reason why we all should know, and that's because you shouldn't be doing it! God Bless the Whistle Blowers!!!
Its high time we remind our Government its they who are here to serve us, and not the other way around!
When Japan laid claim to huge sections of China just before WWII, it was to stoke the fire of their growing economy with raw materials and cheap slave labor from China. It was also a flagrant thumb at the rule of international law, and the rest of the world. How would you have handled that in a neutral way? China has been marching all over Tibet for years now, claiming its a long lost state come home. Nobody wanted to start WWIII over Tibet, and that's understandable, but it was still wrong on a thousand levels. Now they claim the entire South Sea, all its islands and inhabitants. Their claim would give them complete control over critical shipping lanes and vital resources that don't belong to them. How exactly would you handle a pit-bull in a neutral fashion?
I do agree this has to be a global response. The U. N. has to say "China, enough already with the sucking up the landscape. It was wrong when Germany did it. It was wrong when Japan did it to you. Its now wrong when you try to do it to others. Cease and desist, before things get out of hand and unhappiness ensues for all."
Really, I've long held that the prize is of little value... I almost lost it when Kissinger got the prize, shortly after going down to South America and orchestrating the assassination of the democratically elected President of Chile using CIA operatives, and beginning one of the ugliest, bloodiest, and most oppressive dictatorships in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Ultimately leading to the slaughter of between 50,000 and 70,000 innocent people, and the absolute gutting of all human rights.
Pointing a U.S. gun at China, does two things:
1. It makes us look like exactly the same kind of thug as China, and that this is some kind of gang war.
2. It destroys any semblance of an attempt at peaceful resolution through international law.
Its hard for the U.S. to get all up in China's face when we own Islands throughout the Pacific that we took from Japan during WWII. We have our own history of land grabbing. That said, we don't lay claim on the ocean between Guam and the U.S., that would be patently absurd. We also have a strong presence on our islands and have maintained them as such since we claimed them. There is no Chinese parallel to the island claimed by China.
The U.N. needs to sit down with China, and make it clear that there will be no South Sea land grab. China's claim are groundless, arbitrary, and steps all over the rights of millions of people who have no intention of being Chinese citizens. This is another Tibet, now with global implications on shipping lanes and free navigation.
The U.N. needs to put its foot down and say that there are substantial sanctions that the entire world can take if China doesn't clean up its act. China can claim the entire pacific ocean if it wants, the rest of the world won't put up with an aggressive, bully, taking whatever it wants. What next, Australia? Indonesia? The days of land grabbing need to come to a halt for all nations (hear that Israel?) Use diplomacy, then international sanctions, only then does a large multinational force arrive and say, "We simply can't let you take what is not yours, step away."
Sorry friend you've clearly entered the wrong synthetics reality. You must be a Python programmer. Their seems to be a bug in "Identity Queuing" and they keep slipping into the VR we like to call "Monty". Might I suggest speaking to someone in the "Dept. of Silly Walks?" They can't help either, but at least you'll be entertained.
Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about. Betty has worked almost non-stop since 1945. Starting when she was a pretty young thing. All you had to do was go to Imdb and check out Betty White's filmography. There are a few women who started in movies at middle age, and they were either character actors or comediennes like Phylis Diller. They're also obviously the exception that proves the rule.
If you're a woman and you aren't young and lovely, you're going to have a very hard time getting ahead in Movies or Television. Hollywood is vitually synonymous with agism and sexism (haven't you ever heard of the casting couch?)
Why do you think shows like the X-Factor are now taking 12 and 13 year olds? Because they want to rob Disney Productions of the next potential mega-star, and still squeeze 20 years of profit out of them before they're washed up at 30. Look at the number of actors who were popular in their 20s and gone by the time they hit 40 (and you'll find 90% are women.) Sex sells, and face it, we are a society that not only worships youth, but have seriously begun to sexualize children. At a time when 150 year life spans are totally possible, Making people second class citizens by the time they reach 40 is dark karma, and as a culture we should maybe be looking at valuing our elders for something more than fetish porn.
Oh no! Its easy for a man to break a woman. All he has to do is take off his pants, show her what he's fondly named "Murphy the moisture seeking wonder weasel", only to expose a unit the looks identical to the one found on the Statue of David, and she laughs till she's broken, Duh!
There is a growing school of thought that suggests the Big Bang was the "Whitehole" side of a Blackhole forming in our parent universe. If our universe has angular momentum that would correlate to the angular momentum of the collapsing star when it reached singularity. This would be indicative of at least a precipitating event that lead to the Big Bang precipitating our universe.
Unfortunately, there are so many things that determine chirality (handedness) including the angular momentum of super-massive hot hydrogen clouds, galaxy clusters and super clusters, even the angular momentum caused by the gravitational effects of universal superstructures. Its hard to determine what is a result of the natural evolution of the universe and what might be a contributing factor in the for of an angular momentum. One would have to look at a huge sample of the 100,000,000,000 or more galaxies in the visible universe and see if there is a net angular momentum of their collective rotation. However in building such an explicit model of such an important universal trait, the things we would then know or could at least derive about the large and small grain structures in the universe would be nothing less than incredible.
I would love to see a wrap around work surface, that rolls up at the back and is translucent. A series of projectors below, project images onto the bottom of the work space. A camera above watches your hands. On the great big beautiful work surface, everything is multi-touch sensitive. Everything is accessible and can be managed by a wide selection of interactive models (everything from 3D mind-maps to a typical business desktop, and a hundred other working interfaces.) In fact depending on the task at hand, you can choose completely different working surfaces. Editing a movie, composing music, painting, writing the great American novel or 3D modeling whatever you want, the environment can be configured to fully support that task or activity. You can have your favorite surfaces saved and easily accessible. Combine this with a Seri-like speech cognition engine. Make the surface acoustically transparent and place a small array of speakers behind the projectors so an apparent sound image can move around with whatever is being projected.
Such a system would transform creativity. Literally unleash invention. When the machine becomes a simple tool, that you can talk to, and that reflects what you can you can dream of by simply moving your hands and fingers. Imagine what you could create with such a machine? The mind boggles.
First, deep cleansing breath... Okay let's do this from the top. The best guess at cost and engineering put a space elevator in the same neighborhood as building a cross Atlantic bridge to Europe. Not impossible, not even necessarily improbable, just utterly unfeasible in today's economy and global political climate. This would have to be a multinational endeavor, and without significant upside for all parties, not something everyone is likely to buy into soon. Worse there are tons of issues around engineering and workability to surmount. An elevator that travels 44,000 miles will take a week to traverse even with a blazing fast transport system. This is well outside of the inner radiation belt and will have to function in the face of solar winds. Dramatic charges along its length (think of it as a huge antenna) will cause it to deal with tremendous forces at it interacts with earth's magnetic field. So many issues. I would expect global peace to break out first. Again possible, just not something you should hold your breath for.
As for robotics, there's a technology with some teeth. Human space habitation with the use of self replicating robots using materials that the moon is rich in, is probably as little as a decade away. Nanotechnology with modified DNA and RNA as scaffolding is already taking off. Article here are increasing dramatically about new applications almost daily. We could have permanent space colonies within the next 20 years. Also remember that technology itself is accelerating exponentially. Look at the amount of change that has occurred over the last 10 years, Baby Boomers can tell you that more has happened in the last 10 years than perhaps the last 30 before it. That rate of change is only going to increase. The next wave of technologies will be far more intimate and impactful. So 2000 years of today's rate of change may only require 50-100 years real time, and in fact the biggest drag on advance is the inertia of human culture itself. As more and more people become adopters of technology, the human beings at the front of the curve will ongoingly out distance those who abstain. This is going to be the interesting century, and predicting it is a job that demands the kind of thinking that is indeed rare. Perhaps even nonexistent. Where we are, who we are, even what we are in the next century is up for grabs.
Its simple. Put a cheap IC and sensor on the battery that warns if the battery is no longer working properly. The driver get's a little red "Battery is Shite" icon and a buzzing noise. He kindly informs the attendant that this is a crap battery, and with all due haste please install one that isn't on its last charge. Done.
Actually they handled that too, by have sets of alternate flywheels spinning in the opposite direction effectively canceling out gyroscopic effects (at least everywhere except at stress points where the flywheels met their bearing.) The problem was coming up with enough titanium to build the scatter shields for all those flywheels, and waiting 5-15 minutes at a power up station getting yourself spun back up.
I doubt this is so, not because it doesn't make sense, on a person to person level. I could totally see this between people. On a corporation to corporation level, the game is a lot colder and a lot more aggressive. I would guess that Apple acted because Samsung actually had a cool product that might actually garner some interest and then market share. They learned from their competition with Android phones, that the way to stay ahead is to nip their competition in the bud, kill their momentum, keep coming out with new features make every other release a market extravaganza, with something super cool everyone will need to have (eg. Seri?)
The Galaxy was an attempt to technologically one up the iPad in a volatile market where minutes make the difference. Hold them back 3 months and you win, hold them back 6 and you crush them.
For the Love of Peat... So put little circular pads at the corners with extra buttons for navigation or menu control or whatever the hell, just so its obviously not an iPad clone, still looks cool, and has simple added features which could be made to make common tasks even simpler.
There are other product designers out there who can envision a simple, elegant and beautiful product. COMPETE!
We are seriously in danger of losing our capacity to invent. I think its the Wilipediafication of our school children. All the rehashed, rehashes of 60s and 70 remakes and their ENDLESS remixes online and on the radio today. Watching people on reality competition shows see one person do something unique and remarkable, then see 2000 contestants after them try to duplicate it badly. Living in a world with endless possibilities, and all Hollywood can come up with is another comic book movie, and all hardware producers can come up with is make it much like and iAnthing-At-All as the friggin law will allow. Enough already. Think of something interesting on your own. That's why you have those big fat frontal lobes. Make them work a little!
Log in Remote and upload then register an app called "Joke of the Day" to your laptop. Make certain it shows up in the Dock. Make certain its Icon is bright, colorful, and funny! Have the App actually provide him with a great joke every day. Have the app also take pictures and send them to you. In fact open video and have it stream to you. Log his keystrokes (it is your computer and he's using it without your permission.) Have is send the web logs, and pretty much anything you can possibly use against him in the future. If he has an iPhone or iPad, get the GPS data from it through the Mac when they sync. When you have everything you need to flush this walking dung from the toilet bowl of life, provide a neat data package to the local PD. If it contains video of other illegal activity, all the better. Find out when the police are about to arrive, and send an email to the idiot (since you've been capturing his email address(es) and password(s), and the email should read as follows:
You my friend are a Scum Sucking Pig,
You seem to think the way to live is to take what is not rightfully yours and rob people of what they worked hard for. This makes you both stupid and self destructive. Your actions will cost you a terrible price, and sadly for you... The fruits of sin have just ripened. Say hi to the detective for me, won't you?
Last, go to the prison they send him to. Let the prison folk know he has a visitor. When he comes, let him know what a beautiful day it is outside. Draw a happy face on the glass of the visitors booth. Let him know the days of taking phones and computers are over. That these machines plus the ubiquitous cameras that are everyplace now make small time crime like his a pointless act with no future. Either get an education and square up his crap, or set the Governors car on fire and get a decent sentence so he'll be guaranteed 3 squares and a roof over his head for the next 15 years. Just stop screwing with folks who can ill afford his silly BS.
First you separate Government and Business the way we should have separated Church and State. Then you put the laws in place that we had separating banking and investing after the first big financial disaster in 1932, starting by reinstating Glass-Steagall at all costs. Ultimately we dissolve the Federal Bank which has been a parasite preying on this nation for over 200 years. We clean out the nest of vipers that D.C. has become, and we reconstitute the "Bill of Rights", and the "Checks and Balances" between government branches as the default operating standard and not just a happy thought about the past. Finally we provide real campaign reform that allows a broad segment of the population to participate in government, and removes the money factor for running that has today's successful candidates beholden to financial sources. As well we enforce critical laws regarding monopoly of the media to ensure there is a diverse and rich source of information to keep both the government and business under constant scrutiny. We repeal the rights of corporations as being equal or superior to human beings to ensure they cannot supplant the humanity they should be serving. Anyway, this is my idea of a good start.
Folks look at the way invention works. Someone creates something. Someone else screws with it and discovers and interesting property. Someone else has a problem, starts hunting for a technology that might solve his problem and POOF!!! a new use emerges. Look at all the things that have mushroomed into complete industries, hell, armies of industries. The laser. What the hell could coherent light be used for? It was a physics experiment. It's probably also the defining technology of the 20th century, responsible for more breakthroughs and more new industries than anything else we've discovered. There are now over a hundred thousand distinct uses for lasers, from cutting corneas to pissing off Police Helicopters. Teflon was an experiment gone wrong, same with the adhesive used in post-it notes. From the first experiments in carbon polymers we now have materials that beggar the imagination.
There are a thousand uses for e-paper that nobody has even dreamed of yet. The mood shirt. Chop sticks with advertisements (thanks Neal Stephenson, now someone's gonna screw up my meals at Panda Garden), Buses with News Crawls, Morphing Wallpaper, Plaid Cars, Polka Dot Sky Scrapers... if you can imagine it, you can make it. Wallpapering your life the way you wallpaper you MP3 app is now physically possible.
Imagine E-Paint, a suspension of components that applies as an emulsion, then separate into layers as it dries. There's your E-Ink for the body. The bottom layer is a conductive array, that senses nerves, and extracts sugars and electrolytes from perspiration to generate electricity to function. Another layer has a simple neural net capable of remembering several images. The top layer contains the display. Use an electrostatic device attached to a computer is used to set an image then store it in the E-Ink. Teach your E-Tattoo to react to your local nerve activity (or vice-versa) so you can switch tattoos at will. Have one of the images be blank so you can choose no ink. The perfect body art.
Who has the most to lose with the implementation of disruptive technologies? Where is the money spent? Who makes the final decisions? I'll let you dig up the bodies, the path should be pretty clear.
I'm guessing the flammable materials in the house would fail long before you damaged or even altered the joists. Why yes, we were absolutely able to eliminate that nagging magnetism... oh that, well yes only the metal parts survived the ensuing conflagration, but consider smoldering ashes a small price to have working electronics in a this modern world:-) No thanks required! good day.
Wow Steve, bravo, what a heroes send off. I'm still half waiting for the burning boat Viking King thing.
Oh, and as if to put that final stroke on a masterpiece, as you pass through the pearly gates, a band of knuckle draggers and mouth breathers thump their chests and grunt loudly to voice their proto-simian displeasure at your having been a more evolved being! Epic dude, such pageant, such grandeur, truly it touches me deeply to see a man who had his hands all over the last century, leave us with grace and an outstretched hand pointing the way for this century.
The bending of light by the deformation of space-time is completely unlike or related to the refraction of light. The first is light following the curvature of space, and all frequencies of light would follow the same path (remember Galileo's experiment from the tower of Pisa? Two different particles are accelerated by gravity in precisely the same way.) The second is a wave function across the boundary of two different optical media. Waves with longer period (lower frequency) are bent more than waves of shorter period (higher frequency.) You can do this experiment with water in a wave tank and see the phenomenon clearly. Unrelated phenomena.
"You need to understand that everyone is rogue trading these days, and a 2 billion dollar loss hardly even rings a bell around here anymore. I mean if we don't smoke half a trillion, I can't get anybody's attention but the janitor!" -- The Security Manager
Slashdot Mirror
Yes they do, his name is Waldo, and if I say any more, they will find me with SureView and all anyone will ever find of me is my right nipple.
Yeah, I know, its an oxymoron. Sadly never more than today. Our government has too many secrets. Too many bodies buried. Too many skeletons in the closet. The secrets its keeping are not in your best interest, or they'd share them with you. No, the only way to keep government in check is with transparency. When an employee of the government see's gross negligence, naked aggression, illegal activities, or profound betrayals of the Constitution or the American People, they are honor bound to make that information public, and any attempt to stop them is itself a crime against the nation. More, they should be treated as heroes, not black listed and hung out to dry or worse prosecuted.
Time after time we hear of some government atrocity, a person of impeccable integrity looks to get redress for the perceived wrong, and is basically told its none of his business not once but time after time. Finally he has nobody left in government to speak to so he tell the media. At which point they either remains anonymous, or they get crucified.
Now they tell us we can all be proud that our government has so wisely spent hundreds of millions of our tax dollars to plug up those nasty leaks and keep those rotten secrets, secret. Isn't that wonderful, now we can all enjoy the benefits of plausible deniability, while our rogue government bombs brown people for oil on behalf of Exxon-Mobil.
Folks, this might be a fine time to howl at your representatives... you know, the folks who are supposed to represent us? Let them know how we feel about government transparency. We're all in this together, and if what Government is doing is obscene, immoral or just plain illegal, there's a good reason why we all should know, and that's because you shouldn't be doing it! God Bless the Whistle Blowers!!!
Its high time we remind our Government its they who are here to serve us, and not the other way around!
When Japan laid claim to huge sections of China just before WWII, it was to stoke the fire of their growing economy with raw materials and cheap slave labor from China. It was also a flagrant thumb at the rule of international law, and the rest of the world. How would you have handled that in a neutral way? China has been marching all over Tibet for years now, claiming its a long lost state come home. Nobody wanted to start WWIII over Tibet, and that's understandable, but it was still wrong on a thousand levels. Now they claim the entire South Sea, all its islands and inhabitants. Their claim would give them complete control over critical shipping lanes and vital resources that don't belong to them. How exactly would you handle a pit-bull in a neutral fashion?
I do agree this has to be a global response. The U. N. has to say "China, enough already with the sucking up the landscape. It was wrong when Germany did it. It was wrong when Japan did it to you. Its now wrong when you try to do it to others. Cease and desist, before things get out of hand and unhappiness ensues for all."
Really, I've long held that the prize is of little value... I almost lost it when Kissinger got the prize, shortly after going down to South America and orchestrating the assassination of the democratically elected President of Chile using CIA operatives, and beginning one of the ugliest, bloodiest, and most oppressive dictatorships in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Ultimately leading to the slaughter of between 50,000 and 70,000 innocent people, and the absolute gutting of all human rights.
Pointing a U.S. gun at China, does two things:
1. It makes us look like exactly the same kind of thug as China, and that this is some kind of gang war.
2. It destroys any semblance of an attempt at peaceful resolution through international law.
Its hard for the U.S. to get all up in China's face when we own Islands throughout the Pacific that we took from Japan during WWII. We have our own history of land grabbing. That said, we don't lay claim on the ocean between Guam and the U.S., that would be patently absurd. We also have a strong presence on our islands and have maintained them as such since we claimed them. There is no Chinese parallel to the island claimed by China.
The U.N. needs to sit down with China, and make it clear that there will be no South Sea land grab. China's claim are groundless, arbitrary, and steps all over the rights of millions of people who have no intention of being Chinese citizens. This is another Tibet, now with global implications on shipping lanes and free navigation.
The U.N. needs to put its foot down and say that there are substantial sanctions that the entire world can take if China doesn't clean up its act. China can claim the entire pacific ocean if it wants, the rest of the world won't put up with an aggressive, bully, taking whatever it wants. What next, Australia? Indonesia? The days of land grabbing need to come to a halt for all nations (hear that Israel?) Use diplomacy, then international sanctions, only then does a large multinational force arrive and say, "We simply can't let you take what is not yours, step away."
Whoops! to late!!!
Sorry friend you've clearly entered the wrong synthetics reality. You must be a Python programmer. Their seems to be a bug in "Identity Queuing" and they keep slipping into the VR we like to call "Monty". Might I suggest speaking to someone in the "Dept. of Silly Walks?" They can't help either, but at least you'll be entertained.
Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about. Betty has worked almost non-stop since 1945. Starting when she was a pretty young thing. All you had to do was go to Imdb and check out Betty White's filmography. There are a few women who started in movies at middle age, and they were either character actors or comediennes like Phylis Diller. They're also obviously the exception that proves the rule.
If you're a woman and you aren't young and lovely, you're going to have a very hard time getting ahead in Movies or Television. Hollywood is vitually synonymous with agism and sexism (haven't you ever heard of the casting couch?)
Why do you think shows like the X-Factor are now taking 12 and 13 year olds? Because they want to rob Disney Productions of the next potential mega-star, and still squeeze 20 years of profit out of them before they're washed up at 30. Look at the number of actors who were popular in their 20s and gone by the time they hit 40 (and you'll find 90% are women.) Sex sells, and face it, we are a society that not only worships youth, but have seriously begun to sexualize children. At a time when 150 year life spans are totally possible, Making people second class citizens by the time they reach 40 is dark karma, and as a culture we should maybe be looking at valuing our elders for something more than fetish porn.
If your unit is spreading tetanus, I would highly recommend seeing a physician at your earliest convenience!
Oh no! Its easy for a man to break a woman. All he has to do is take off his pants, show her what he's fondly named "Murphy the moisture seeking wonder weasel", only to expose a unit the looks identical to the one found on the Statue of David, and she laughs till she's broken, Duh!
There is a growing school of thought that suggests the Big Bang was the "Whitehole" side of a Blackhole forming in our parent universe. If our universe has angular momentum that would correlate to the angular momentum of the collapsing star when it reached singularity. This would be indicative of at least a precipitating event that lead to the Big Bang precipitating our universe.
Unfortunately, there are so many things that determine chirality (handedness) including the angular momentum of super-massive hot hydrogen clouds, galaxy clusters and super clusters, even the angular momentum caused by the gravitational effects of universal superstructures. Its hard to determine what is a result of the natural evolution of the universe and what might be a contributing factor in the for of an angular momentum. One would have to look at a huge sample of the 100,000,000,000 or more galaxies in the visible universe and see if there is a net angular momentum of their collective rotation. However in building such an explicit model of such an important universal trait, the things we would then know or could at least derive about the large and small grain structures in the universe would be nothing less than incredible.
I would love to see a wrap around work surface, that rolls up at the back and is translucent. A series of projectors below, project images onto the bottom of the work space. A camera above watches your hands. On the great big beautiful work surface, everything is multi-touch sensitive. Everything is accessible and can be managed by a wide selection of interactive models (everything from 3D mind-maps to a typical business desktop, and a hundred other working interfaces.) In fact depending on the task at hand, you can choose completely different working surfaces. Editing a movie, composing music, painting, writing the great American novel or 3D modeling whatever you want, the environment can be configured to fully support that task or activity. You can have your favorite surfaces saved and easily accessible. Combine this with a Seri-like speech cognition engine. Make the surface acoustically transparent and place a small array of speakers behind the projectors so an apparent sound image can move around with whatever is being projected.
Such a system would transform creativity. Literally unleash invention. When the machine becomes a simple tool, that you can talk to, and that reflects what you can you can dream of by simply moving your hands and fingers. Imagine what you could create with such a machine? The mind boggles.
First, deep cleansing breath... Okay let's do this from the top. The best guess at cost and engineering put a space elevator in the same neighborhood as building a cross Atlantic bridge to Europe. Not impossible, not even necessarily improbable, just utterly unfeasible in today's economy and global political climate. This would have to be a multinational endeavor, and without significant upside for all parties, not something everyone is likely to buy into soon. Worse there are tons of issues around engineering and workability to surmount. An elevator that travels 44,000 miles will take a week to traverse even with a blazing fast transport system. This is well outside of the inner radiation belt and will have to function in the face of solar winds. Dramatic charges along its length (think of it as a huge antenna) will cause it to deal with tremendous forces at it interacts with earth's magnetic field. So many issues. I would expect global peace to break out first. Again possible, just not something you should hold your breath for.
As for robotics, there's a technology with some teeth. Human space habitation with the use of self replicating robots using materials that the moon is rich in, is probably as little as a decade away. Nanotechnology with modified DNA and RNA as scaffolding is already taking off. Article here are increasing dramatically about new applications almost daily. We could have permanent space colonies within the next 20 years. Also remember that technology itself is accelerating exponentially. Look at the amount of change that has occurred over the last 10 years, Baby Boomers can tell you that more has happened in the last 10 years than perhaps the last 30 before it. That rate of change is only going to increase. The next wave of technologies will be far more intimate and impactful. So 2000 years of today's rate of change may only require 50-100 years real time, and in fact the biggest drag on advance is the inertia of human culture itself. As more and more people become adopters of technology, the human beings at the front of the curve will ongoingly out distance those who abstain. This is going to be the interesting century, and predicting it is a job that demands the kind of thinking that is indeed rare. Perhaps even nonexistent. Where we are, who we are, even what we are in the next century is up for grabs.
Its simple. Put a cheap IC and sensor on the battery that warns if the battery is no longer working properly. The driver get's a little red "Battery is Shite" icon and a buzzing noise. He kindly informs the attendant that this is a crap battery, and with all due haste please install one that isn't on its last charge. Done.
Actually they handled that too, by have sets of alternate flywheels spinning in the opposite direction effectively canceling out gyroscopic effects (at least everywhere except at stress points where the flywheels met their bearing.) The problem was coming up with enough titanium to build the scatter shields for all those flywheels, and waiting 5-15 minutes at a power up station getting yourself spun back up.
I doubt this is so, not because it doesn't make sense, on a person to person level. I could totally see this between people. On a corporation to corporation level, the game is a lot colder and a lot more aggressive. I would guess that Apple acted because Samsung actually had a cool product that might actually garner some interest and then market share. They learned from their competition with Android phones, that the way to stay ahead is to nip their competition in the bud, kill their momentum, keep coming out with new features make every other release a market extravaganza, with something super cool everyone will need to have (eg. Seri?)
The Galaxy was an attempt to technologically one up the iPad in a volatile market where minutes make the difference. Hold them back 3 months and you win, hold them back 6 and you crush them.
This isn't a soap opera, its a chess match.
For the Love of Peat... So put little circular pads at the corners with extra buttons for navigation or menu control or whatever the hell, just so its obviously not an iPad clone, still looks cool, and has simple added features which could be made to make common tasks even simpler.
There are other product designers out there who can envision a simple, elegant and beautiful product. COMPETE!
We are seriously in danger of losing our capacity to invent. I think its the Wilipediafication of our school children. All the rehashed, rehashes of 60s and 70 remakes and their ENDLESS remixes online and on the radio today. Watching people on reality competition shows see one person do something unique and remarkable, then see 2000 contestants after them try to duplicate it badly. Living in a world with endless possibilities, and all Hollywood can come up with is another comic book movie, and all hardware producers can come up with is make it much like and iAnthing-At-All as the friggin law will allow. Enough already. Think of something interesting on your own. That's why you have those big fat frontal lobes. Make them work a little!
Log in Remote and upload then register an app called "Joke of the Day" to your laptop. Make certain it shows up in the Dock. Make certain its Icon is bright, colorful, and funny! Have the App actually provide him with a great joke every day. Have the app also take pictures and send them to you. In fact open video and have it stream to you. Log his keystrokes (it is your computer and he's using it without your permission.) Have is send the web logs, and pretty much anything you can possibly use against him in the future. If he has an iPhone or iPad, get the GPS data from it through the Mac when they sync. When you have everything you need to flush this walking dung from the toilet bowl of life, provide a neat data package to the local PD. If it contains video of other illegal activity, all the better. Find out when the police are about to arrive, and send an email to the idiot (since you've been capturing his email address(es) and password(s), and the email should read as follows:
You my friend are a Scum Sucking Pig,
You seem to think the way to live is to take what is not rightfully yours and rob people of what they worked hard for. This makes you both stupid and self destructive. Your actions will cost you a terrible price, and sadly for you... The fruits of sin have just ripened. Say hi to the detective for me, won't you?
Last, go to the prison they send him to. Let the prison folk know he has a visitor. When he comes, let him know what a beautiful day it is outside. Draw a happy face on the glass of the visitors booth. Let him know the days of taking phones and computers are over. That these machines plus the ubiquitous cameras that are everyplace now make small time crime like his a pointless act with no future. Either get an education and square up his crap, or set the Governors car on fire and get a decent sentence so he'll be guaranteed 3 squares and a roof over his head for the next 15 years. Just stop screwing with folks who can ill afford his silly BS.
First you separate Government and Business the way we should have separated Church and State. Then you put the laws in place that we had separating banking and investing after the first big financial disaster in 1932, starting by reinstating Glass-Steagall at all costs. Ultimately we dissolve the Federal Bank which has been a parasite preying on this nation for over 200 years. We clean out the nest of vipers that D.C. has become, and we reconstitute the "Bill of Rights", and the "Checks and Balances" between government branches as the default operating standard and not just a happy thought about the past. Finally we provide real campaign reform that allows a broad segment of the population to participate in government, and removes the money factor for running that has today's successful candidates beholden to financial sources. As well we enforce critical laws regarding monopoly of the media to ensure there is a diverse and rich source of information to keep both the government and business under constant scrutiny. We repeal the rights of corporations as being equal or superior to human beings to ensure they cannot supplant the humanity they should be serving. Anyway, this is my idea of a good start.
Folks look at the way invention works. Someone creates something. Someone else screws with it and discovers and interesting property. Someone else has a problem, starts hunting for a technology that might solve his problem and POOF!!! a new use emerges. Look at all the things that have mushroomed into complete industries, hell, armies of industries. The laser. What the hell could coherent light be used for? It was a physics experiment. It's probably also the defining technology of the 20th century, responsible for more breakthroughs and more new industries than anything else we've discovered. There are now over a hundred thousand distinct uses for lasers, from cutting corneas to pissing off Police Helicopters. Teflon was an experiment gone wrong, same with the adhesive used in post-it notes. From the first experiments in carbon polymers we now have materials that beggar the imagination.
There are a thousand uses for e-paper that nobody has even dreamed of yet. The mood shirt. Chop sticks with advertisements (thanks Neal Stephenson, now someone's gonna screw up my meals at Panda Garden), Buses with News Crawls, Morphing Wallpaper, Plaid Cars, Polka Dot Sky Scrapers... if you can imagine it, you can make it. Wallpapering your life the way you wallpaper you MP3 app is now physically possible.
Imagine E-Paint, a suspension of components that applies as an emulsion, then separate into layers as it dries. There's your E-Ink for the body. The bottom layer is a conductive array, that senses nerves, and extracts sugars and electrolytes from perspiration to generate electricity to function. Another layer has a simple neural net capable of remembering several images. The top layer contains the display. Use an electrostatic device attached to a computer is used to set an image then store it in the E-Ink. Teach your E-Tattoo to react to your local nerve activity (or vice-versa) so you can switch tattoos at will. Have one of the images be blank so you can choose no ink. The perfect body art.
If you can imagine it, you can create it.
Who has the most to lose with the implementation of disruptive technologies? Where is the money spent? Who makes the final decisions? I'll let you dig up the bodies, the path should be pretty clear.
I'm guessing the flammable materials in the house would fail long before you damaged or even altered the joists. Why yes, we were absolutely able to eliminate that nagging magnetism... oh that, well yes only the metal parts survived the ensuing conflagration, but consider smoldering ashes a small price to have working electronics in a this modern world :-) No thanks required! good day.
Wow Steve, bravo, what a heroes send off. I'm still half waiting for the burning boat Viking King thing.
Oh, and as if to put that final stroke on a masterpiece, as you pass through the pearly gates, a band of knuckle draggers and mouth breathers thump their chests and grunt loudly to voice their proto-simian displeasure at your having been a more evolved being! Epic dude, such pageant, such grandeur, truly it touches me deeply to see a man who had his hands all over the last century, leave us with grace and an outstretched hand pointing the way for this century.
The bending of light by the deformation of space-time is completely unlike or related to the refraction of light. The first is light following the curvature of space, and all frequencies of light would follow the same path (remember Galileo's experiment from the tower of Pisa? Two different particles are accelerated by gravity in precisely the same way.) The second is a wave function across the boundary of two different optical media. Waves with longer period (lower frequency) are bent more than waves of shorter period (higher frequency.) You can do this experiment with water in a wave tank and see the phenomenon clearly. Unrelated phenomena.
"You need to understand that everyone is rogue trading these days, and a 2 billion dollar loss hardly even rings a bell around here anymore. I mean if we don't smoke half a trillion, I can't get anybody's attention but the janitor!" -- The Security Manager