The vast majority of paleontologists and geologists believe it entirely likely that previous societies as technologically advanced as ours could have existed.
Ok, name one. That's ok, we'll wait.
So you assume a previous intelligent society would have used the same fuels as us (really ? Fossil fuels used by the "people" whose time fossil fuels were LAID DOWN IN... think about that for a second).
Ok, then. What DID these hypothetical advanced civiliations burn? What sort of technology did they use? How come we haven't' recovered ANY of it, ANYWHERE (although we have recovered evidence of even such relatively ephemeral things such as dinosaur feathers via their impressions in the fossil matrix).
More-over all the stuff you mention are what, 100 years old ? So if we'd died out just a century sooner than right now - no evidence would have survived. We were a pretty advanced technological society even then though.
Then the hypothetical future cockroach civilization would have found things like railroad tracks, rail cars, steamships, large masonry building, the first automobiles, pottery, primitive electrical devices, silverware, etc, etc. All of which were made in profusion by 1910 and would be a lot more easily fossilized than bones.
Carl Sagan said "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
This one takes the cake - quoting Carl Sagan to support this fantasyland. You know what else Carl Sagan said? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Dude, you want to make claims like this - you need to cough some up.
Emergence of "anatomically modern humans": 200,000 years ago. If you have some other reputable source that places the age of Homo sapiens" more than 25 times older than this, well... [citation needed].
Or more than likely, you're just making this stuff up.
In military parlance, the terms are not equivalent. You "detect" contacts all the time, but frequently you don't know who they are. This is really about ROE - they're saying that the system is going to capable/allowed to shoot at targets it's detected even if it can't "identify" them.
Because I'm sure they're controlling these things via the Internet. Let's think about this a little bit - obviously these things would have to be controlled via encrypted comm links... or the North Koreans would root the bots. If J. Random Hacker wanted to play this game, he'd have to be... in the DMZ, which I doubt too many JRH's have the capability or interest to do.
The military forces of the world have been using systems way more automated than this for a very long time. Examples:
Mk 46, 48, 50 homing torpedoes
Harpoon anti-ship cruise missiles
Mk 15 Phalanx CIWS
The first two are given an approximate target location, launched, and told to kill any ship (submarine) they find there. The Phalanx is turned on and told to shoot any airborne object that meets certain threat criteria. All done completely autonomously, with no ability for a human to even countermand an attack decision.
By comparison, the South Korean system is actually remote controlled - it's not especially remarkable in any way, nor does it violate any particular law of war. This is old news.
... the question isn't whether it's legal. The question is whether it's a smart business decision. Quibbling over the definition of censorship is kind of beside the point here. Whatever you call it, Apple's propensity to silence its critics isn't likely to help the company in the long run.
Obviously you're not going to see a just-started implosion on a 5 year stock chart. Come back six months from now and tell me how their stock price is doing (if Apple does nothing to fix this).
... the defects weren't obvious until you got the phone in your hands. But I think Apple is going to have a serious problem on their hands if they don't face up to reality here. There are certainly a bunch of fanboys out there who'll buy anything Steve puts out, but you're not going to make blockbuster sales just on those fanboys. You need to convince ordinary schmoes that the phones are worth buying, and this incident isn't helping.
I bought an iPhone 3G when they came out, and was a little nervous about how the service was going to be. But to my very pleasant surprise, it absolutely blew away what I had before. I rarely have any issue with dropped calls, etc. I think the AT&T service problems depend pretty heavily on where you are - they're probably oversubscribed in big cities.
But... while I had been planning on replacing the 3G with an iPhone 4, this latest issue is giving me second thoughts. Now I'm likely to wait until the dust settles here.
The question is whether it's a smart thing to do. And without question, it's not. The issue is now getting increased prominence as a direct result of Apple's own actions. Obviously it would be a lot better in the long run for Apple to face the music, admit their device has a problem, recall it, and fix the problem. But I doubt Big Steve is psychologically capable of admitting an error of this magnitude.
... the answer to that problem is to write applications correctly, not enforce a single-button only policy on the world. Which is what I was living with on the Powerbook.
It should also be noted that in addition to lacking a right button (equivalent), the supplied driver also lacked any equivalent of the scroll wheel. Are you going to now tell me my system was more usable because I had to move the cursor to the edge of the screen every time I wanted to scroll down the page?
I'm not arguing that it's a bad idea to make critical functionality available without extra buttons. But for heaven's sake, reducing the system's functionality to the lowest common denominator cripples everyone else. I return to my pad & paper analogy. It's the most usable word processor ever invented - anyone who can read and write can use it. All its functions are intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. But it doesn't do much of anything.
It's just not reasonable to assume that users shouldn't have to learn anything to use a program.
At least, you've never used an older Mac laptop. Because the default trackpad driver didn't include any way to right click (except by holding down control or command or something). Which was why I did, in fact, have to get a third party driver.
in fact, it's often illegal; good luck with modifying a car nowadays.
What? It's completely legal and people do it all the time. From body mods (look up the term "ricer") to rechipping/reprogramming to exhaust mods to all sorts of other changes, people still chop up and reconfigure their cars as much as they ever did. I'm not sure where you're getting this idea.
... do any of you people advocating going back to the good old days (before children's toys had safety features) actually have kids? Look, I agree that kids are overprotected these days, but seriously... letting your kids play with phosporus and sodium metal? You don't have to be a raving helicopter parent to see the problems here - think about it. Phosphorus is extremely poisonous, and both sodium and phosphorus can set your children on fire WITH NO PRACTICAL WAY TO PUT IT OUT. Some amount of protection here is a good thing.
Nowadays if you build a little rocket in your backyard and set it off, you're liable to get a visit from Homeland Security and be branded a potential terrorist.
Not hardly. I launch water powered rockets in the city park all the time, and no one has said a word. And if only fire will do it for you, my buddy frequently comes along and launches his (home built) Estes rockets in the same park. The situation isn't as bad as it's made out to be.
When I was kid, I remember playing with a stick and imagined it was a sword and a gun and a spear and a lightsabre and a shovel and...
Now parents will buy the kid a play-lightsabre. You can not imagine that to be a shovel or a gun.
Why on earth not? If you can imagine a stick is a shovel or a gun or whatever, you can imagine a lightsaber as any of those things. My daughter does it a lot - she has a Barbie car that's been a surface boat, a submarine, and a spaceship (so far - she hasn't had it that long). Kids press toys into service as things other than what the manufacturer intended all the time.
I learned to solder when I was eight. She'll probably learn long before that.
You're going to put a soldering iron (or god forbid, a torch) in the hands of a child way before she's eight? Something (or someone) is going to end up getting burned. Speaking as the parent of a seven year old, I can't help but think this is a really bad idea. But as for the rest of it... very cool.
No, I don't think the parent missed it at all
on
The Creativity Crisis
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Look, I agree that we've kind of gone overboard with kid's safety. Kids should be able to just run around outside without parents freaking out about it. But geez, complaining about wearing helmets on bikes? Sure, lots of kids survived childhood just fine without them. But some didn't.
Come on, people. Making kids wear appropriate protective gear is not exactly child abuse. It's not that expensive, pretty comfortable, and it saves lives. Spare me the tales of woe that you're not able to let your kids jump their bikes, helmetless, off 15 foot high ramps without cries of child endangerment. Because that's what it is.
You're either going to have to switch between websites (which requires you to either fiddle around in your list of bookmarks, bang out addresses on a teeny little keyboard, or google them); or switch between apps. But yeah, personal preference. I end up using apps for some things, browsing/googling for others.
Not sure what's trolly about this
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 1
While I agree that to some extent it's a little nuts to download a ton of apps to do the same thing you can do with the browser, I can at least kind of see the attraction. I definitely prefer the iPhone Wikipedia app to firing up Mobile Safari and navigating to Wikipedia, as I find the site easier to use in its custom app.
Besides, nothing's more pathetic than a libertarian whining that a free public service he enjoys is about to be cut off.
Most. Awesome. Smackdown. EVAR.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned so far
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 1
Sure, a lot of magazines/papers are coming out in the "app" format: you get some free (or free-ish) viewer app, then subscribe to the content. But have you seen the prices? They want you to pay 3-4 times as much per issue as you'd be paying for the dead tree version! Usually there's at least some multimedia content added, but still... at those prices, I doubt the web has much to worry about.
This whole thing strikes me as an attempt to recreate the world of content delivery via CD-ROM, only with no physical media and even higher prices. Good luck with that.
For example, on a machine that ships with a single button mouse, nothing stops you from installing a three button mouse
One button mice are not so useful, but as you say, they can be replaced with n-button mice. One button trackpads, however, are the devil. They obviously can't be replaced, and many of us don't want to replace a trackpad with a mouse. I was in this situation with my first Powerbook, and I had to search out and install a semi-crappy third-party replacement trackpad driver to obtain right-click capability (which seemed to break every time Apple put out a new OSX point release).
Look, even Apple has figured this out - their laptops all come with right-click capable trackpads. Usability is important, but so is usefulness - this fetish for usability-uber-alles cripples advanced users' ability to get things done. The way to address the problems is to write programs correctly, not do the hardware equivalent of tying one hand behind our back. Consider that a pad and paper is way more "usable" than any word processor could ever be... but that's because the pad and paper doesn't do much of anything. While our situation can be improved by thinking about usability, it's ultimately unavoidable that the users are actually going to have to learn SOMETHING about how their systems work.
... would be quite a feat. You'd have to overcome an enormous amount of EM repulsion. Close-packed would likely be close enough for strong force effects to come into play, but without some neutrons present, not sufficient to hold the protons together in a "nucleus". I guess what I'm saying is that either you have a really thick-walled liter bottle, or else you're talking about a really diffuse "gas" of protons. You'd probably want to keep your bottle in a hard vacuum, too, because a litter of dense-packed protons is going to be carrying a LOT of coulombs - it would suck all the electrons out of anything it came in contact with.
If you're talking about hydrogen atoms, that's another story, but even if you managed to make a liter of metallic hydrogen, that's a lot less protons - hydrogen atoms are a LOT bigger than bare protons.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, name one. That's ok, we'll wait.
Ok, then. What DID these hypothetical advanced civiliations burn? What sort of technology did they use? How come we haven't' recovered ANY of it, ANYWHERE (although we have recovered evidence of even such relatively ephemeral things such as dinosaur feathers via their impressions in the fossil matrix).
Then the hypothetical future cockroach civilization would have found things like railroad tracks, rail cars, steamships, large masonry building, the first automobiles, pottery, primitive electrical devices, silverware, etc, etc. All of which were made in profusion by 1910 and would be a lot more easily fossilized than bones.
This one takes the cake - quoting Carl Sagan to support this fantasyland. You know what else Carl Sagan said? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Dude, you want to make claims like this - you need to cough some up.
Emergence of "anatomically modern humans": 200,000 years ago. If you have some other reputable source that places the age of Homo sapiens" more than 25 times older than this, well... [citation needed].
Or more than likely, you're just making this stuff up.
Evidently the motion of the sun through the arms doesn't have the correct periodicity.
In military parlance, the terms are not equivalent. You "detect" contacts all the time, but frequently you don't know who they are. This is really about ROE - they're saying that the system is going to capable/allowed to shoot at targets it's detected even if it can't "identify" them.
Because I'm sure they're controlling these things via the Internet. Let's think about this a little bit - obviously these things would have to be controlled via encrypted comm links... or the North Koreans would root the bots. If J. Random Hacker wanted to play this game, he'd have to be... in the DMZ, which I doubt too many JRH's have the capability or interest to do.
The military forces of the world have been using systems way more automated than this for a very long time. Examples:
The first two are given an approximate target location, launched, and told to kill any ship (submarine) they find there. The Phalanx is turned on and told to shoot any airborne object that meets certain threat criteria. All done completely autonomously, with no ability for a human to even countermand an attack decision.
By comparison, the South Korean system is actually remote controlled - it's not especially remarkable in any way, nor does it violate any particular law of war. This is old news.
... the question isn't whether it's legal. The question is whether it's a smart business decision. Quibbling over the definition of censorship is kind of beside the point here. Whatever you call it, Apple's propensity to silence its critics isn't likely to help the company in the long run.
Obviously you're not going to see a just-started implosion on a 5 year stock chart. Come back six months from now and tell me how their stock price is doing (if Apple does nothing to fix this).
... the defects weren't obvious until you got the phone in your hands. But I think Apple is going to have a serious problem on their hands if they don't face up to reality here. There are certainly a bunch of fanboys out there who'll buy anything Steve puts out, but you're not going to make blockbuster sales just on those fanboys. You need to convince ordinary schmoes that the phones are worth buying, and this incident isn't helping.
I bought an iPhone 3G when they came out, and was a little nervous about how the service was going to be. But to my very pleasant surprise, it absolutely blew away what I had before. I rarely have any issue with dropped calls, etc. I think the AT&T service problems depend pretty heavily on where you are - they're probably oversubscribed in big cities.
But... while I had been planning on replacing the 3G with an iPhone 4, this latest issue is giving me second thoughts. Now I'm likely to wait until the dust settles here.
The question is whether it's a smart thing to do. And without question, it's not. The issue is now getting increased prominence as a direct result of Apple's own actions. Obviously it would be a lot better in the long run for Apple to face the music, admit their device has a problem, recall it, and fix the problem. But I doubt Big Steve is psychologically capable of admitting an error of this magnitude.
Disclosure: Mac and iPhone (3G) user here.
... the answer to that problem is to write applications correctly, not enforce a single-button only policy on the world. Which is what I was living with on the Powerbook.
It should also be noted that in addition to lacking a right button (equivalent), the supplied driver also lacked any equivalent of the scroll wheel. Are you going to now tell me my system was more usable because I had to move the cursor to the edge of the screen every time I wanted to scroll down the page?
I'm not arguing that it's a bad idea to make critical functionality available without extra buttons. But for heaven's sake, reducing the system's functionality to the lowest common denominator cripples everyone else. I return to my pad & paper analogy. It's the most usable word processor ever invented - anyone who can read and write can use it. All its functions are intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. But it doesn't do much of anything.
It's just not reasonable to assume that users shouldn't have to learn anything to use a program.
At least, you've never used an older Mac laptop. Because the default trackpad driver didn't include any way to right click (except by holding down control or command or something). Which was why I did, in fact, have to get a third party driver.
What? It's completely legal and people do it all the time. From body mods (look up the term "ricer") to rechipping/reprogramming to exhaust mods to all sorts of other changes, people still chop up and reconfigure their cars as much as they ever did. I'm not sure where you're getting this idea.
... do any of you people advocating going back to the good old days (before children's toys had safety features) actually have kids? Look, I agree that kids are overprotected these days, but seriously... letting your kids play with phosporus and sodium metal? You don't have to be a raving helicopter parent to see the problems here - think about it. Phosphorus is extremely poisonous, and both sodium and phosphorus can set your children on fire WITH NO PRACTICAL WAY TO PUT IT OUT. Some amount of protection here is a good thing.
Not hardly. I launch water powered rockets in the city park all the time, and no one has said a word. And if only fire will do it for you, my buddy frequently comes along and launches his (home built) Estes rockets in the same park. The situation isn't as bad as it's made out to be.
Why on earth not? If you can imagine a stick is a shovel or a gun or whatever, you can imagine a lightsaber as any of those things. My daughter does it a lot - she has a Barbie car that's been a surface boat, a submarine, and a spaceship (so far - she hasn't had it that long). Kids press toys into service as things other than what the manufacturer intended all the time.
... but this part is nuts:
You're going to put a soldering iron (or god forbid, a torch) in the hands of a child way before she's eight? Something (or someone) is going to end up getting burned. Speaking as the parent of a seven year old, I can't help but think this is a really bad idea. But as for the rest of it... very cool.
Look, I agree that we've kind of gone overboard with kid's safety. Kids should be able to just run around outside without parents freaking out about it. But geez, complaining about wearing helmets on bikes? Sure, lots of kids survived childhood just fine without them. But some didn't.
Come on, people. Making kids wear appropriate protective gear is not exactly child abuse. It's not that expensive, pretty comfortable, and it saves lives. Spare me the tales of woe that you're not able to let your kids jump their bikes, helmetless, off 15 foot high ramps without cries of child endangerment. Because that's what it is.
You're either going to have to switch between websites (which requires you to either fiddle around in your list of bookmarks, bang out addresses on a teeny little keyboard, or google them); or switch between apps. But yeah, personal preference. I end up using apps for some things, browsing/googling for others.
While I agree that to some extent it's a little nuts to download a ton of apps to do the same thing you can do with the browser, I can at least kind of see the attraction. I definitely prefer the iPhone Wikipedia app to firing up Mobile Safari and navigating to Wikipedia, as I find the site easier to use in its custom app.
Most. Awesome. Smackdown. EVAR.
Sure, a lot of magazines/papers are coming out in the "app" format: you get some free (or free-ish) viewer app, then subscribe to the content. But have you seen the prices? They want you to pay 3-4 times as much per issue as you'd be paying for the dead tree version! Usually there's at least some multimedia content added, but still... at those prices, I doubt the web has much to worry about.
This whole thing strikes me as an attempt to recreate the world of content delivery via CD-ROM, only with no physical media and even higher prices. Good luck with that.
One button mice are not so useful, but as you say, they can be replaced with n-button mice. One button trackpads, however, are the devil. They obviously can't be replaced, and many of us don't want to replace a trackpad with a mouse. I was in this situation with my first Powerbook, and I had to search out and install a semi-crappy third-party replacement trackpad driver to obtain right-click capability (which seemed to break every time Apple put out a new OSX point release).
Look, even Apple has figured this out - their laptops all come with right-click capable trackpads. Usability is important, but so is usefulness - this fetish for usability-uber-alles cripples advanced users' ability to get things done. The way to address the problems is to write programs correctly, not do the hardware equivalent of tying one hand behind our back. Consider that a pad and paper is way more "usable" than any word processor could ever be... but that's because the pad and paper doesn't do much of anything. While our situation can be improved by thinking about usability, it's ultimately unavoidable that the users are actually going to have to learn SOMETHING about how their systems work.
... would be quite a feat. You'd have to overcome an enormous amount of EM repulsion. Close-packed would likely be close enough for strong force effects to come into play, but without some neutrons present, not sufficient to hold the protons together in a "nucleus". I guess what I'm saying is that either you have a really thick-walled liter bottle, or else you're talking about a really diffuse "gas" of protons. You'd probably want to keep your bottle in a hard vacuum, too, because a litter of dense-packed protons is going to be carrying a LOT of coulombs - it would suck all the electrons out of anything it came in contact with.
If you're talking about hydrogen atoms, that's another story, but even if you managed to make a liter of metallic hydrogen, that's a lot less protons - hydrogen atoms are a LOT bigger than bare protons.
No I don't... I have a MobileMe account and I've stuck with the "mac.com" domain, which still works. "me.com" is too weird for words.