Every time this thought comes up, my brain falls back to musing that the Universe's dark matter is made up of Dyson spheres, and that the stars we can see are a "nature preserve".
Totally frivolous, I know. And probably easy to test false.
That and you can easily get fast and accurate results with paper ballots before midnight as well. It's really not that hard, and worth one nights effort every few years.
There was an Atari emulator that would allow multiple players to play a single game (e.g. MULE) from two net connected computers. Was a bit hard to set up though.
A) Disaster: Fire. Flood. Earthquake. B) Carless mistake or Idiocy: "rm -r/" can happen to the best of us.
Nothing but an offsite backup will do.
I'd burn a copy to good quality DVD's in an offsite location (an office drawer at work does the trick for me) as you accumulate data. Replace the media every 5 years, as new media come out.
One of the reasons I stopped reading slashdot was because of the infantile posts on April Fools... now I come back and there's none! World must be ending or something...
The only thing I care about is the cost of BD-R (Blue Ray Writable). We've been waiting a very long time for a replacement for DVD-Rs, and DVD-R9 at decent write speeds are only now becoming both affordable and practical (compared to DVD-R5).
I figure my BD-R threshold is about $5 per disk. Presently they seem to be going for $15-$22 per disk. I'll be willing to buy a BD-R reader/burner when 25GB single layer BD-R's are at $5, which interestingly is the price of CD-Rs when I finally decided to make the switch from floppies in 1996. That was a 450 fold increase in media size. CD-R to DVD-R was a 6 fold increase. I'll be content with another 6 fold increase.
Hopefully BD/BD-R support for MythTV will be available by then.
Agreed. Turing test passing AI is way up there beyond flying cars in predictions that won't come true for a very, VERY long time, if ever. If we're going to see an AI in 20 years, it's going to be biological rather than electronic. This is a problem where no amount of extra computing power you can throw at the problem will solve it. The theory to make it work just isn't there.
If you could show that a machine (say like SETI at home) could pass a Turing test, even if it needed a day to make a reply, I'd believe it was possible. It's just not coming, folks.
Re:Now there are 3 Liberals to decide between..
on
Has Ron Paul Quit?
·
· Score: 1
politicalcompass.org is awesome.
I love how Barack Obama is on the same point on the political graph as the most right wing party in Canada.
I've had an endoscopy in the last 2 months. Anything smaller than the existing, close to 1cm cables (or so it felt) would have been a vast improvement.
"Hentai Tentacle Porn Oral Rape" would be a suitable description of the experience. I recommend them to all my enemies.
I would **LOVE** to see the ideas implemented in his simulator (real Newtonian physics, Multi Function Display orbital computers, Interplanetary transfer orbits, great physics engine) implenented in a MMO environment.
Maybe... but this screams out more of "Fire Sale! Everything must go!"
Forget the sales numbers of HD-DVD players. Watch the production numbers of HD-DVD disks. If that number stalls or starts dropping this thing is over for sure.
Considering the amount of non-renewable resources is fixed, and that one day we'll be mining our garbage dumps and recycling everything else, one would think that space exploration is necessary from an economical point of view.
At some point in the future, that exponential growth of a market economy and the fixed size of the planet are going to crash, hard. We either transition to a flat, non-growth economy, or leave the planet in search of more resources. It's as simple as that.
Also, The Theory of Gravity is a "theory in crisis", far more so than the Theory of Natural Selection. The inability of physicists to unify general relativity with quantum physics for the past 75 years is a black mark on Einstein's work.
If we were to then use the logic bombs used by the ID crowd, we could conclude that gravity does not exist. (Insert "Intelligent Falling" joke here).
I have a good friend living in Romania. She's not a scammer, nor works for a scamming company, but because of Romania's label as a scamming country, internet usage can be very hard for her. For instance, Romanian credit cards are worthless on the Internet, even though she will pay for the goods she purchases.
I'm figuring things might get a smidge easier now that Romania is part of the EU. It would still be nice if she could validate in some way that she was a good customer, rather than a "Romanian customer"
Thanks for this... Not many people discuss the Red Queen Hypothesis when talking about evolution, even though sexual selection is a bigger factor in evolution than natural selection.
Disease and Sexual Selection have always, ALWAYS been bigger factors than Natural Selection to determine the course of our evolution since the evolution of sex itself.
A lot has changed in evolutionary theory in the past 30 years. I'd recommend picking up a copy of Matt Ridley's "Red Queen", or at least having a glance at the wikipedia article on the subject.
Considering the Earth is a closed system with a fixed amount of resources, our options for maintaining our way of life include:
1) Significantly reducing the Earth's population, perhaps by a factor of ten. (This includes killing off others and taking their resources) 2) Leaving the Earth to harvest resources elsewhere.
Option 1 at best will maintain our present standard of living. Constant exponential increase in standard living, constrained to the surface of the Earth, is impossible.
Even conservation will at best delay the inevitable.
The C64 was my computer for about 5 years as a kid, from 1983 to 1988. I loved that machine, but went through my fair share of 1541 drive realignments.
I just recently picked up a GP2X F200 (the linux homebrew console from Gamepark Holdings in South Korea), my first ever handheld console at the age of 33. I was ecstatic at the 64 emulation on the device.. it was perfect! I'd played VICE and Frodo on my PC before, but paying games like M.U.L.E., Jumpman and Lode Runner again on a small handheld has made my year. The only problem is that the 1541 drive needs to be emulated as well, so load times can be similar to the original game.:)
(Oh it also does NES, SNES, SegaCD, Amiga, GBA, NeoGeo, etc etc etc... for you people who are into that kind of thing.)
At the very least, if you owned a C64, go hunt down the VICE emulator. Lots of memories will flood back.
For those of you who don't want to pick up nasty bookseses, pick up a copy of the Orange Box, and play through Half Life 2. Particularly pay attention to the developers commentary in HL2 Episodes One and Two, Portal, and Team Fortress. You'll have a much better appreciation for what level design is and what it means, and (IMHO) Valve is the king of it.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but this could be factored into the last part of the Drake equation: How long a civilization survives, *and* emits radio waves.
Every time this thought comes up, my brain falls back to musing that the Universe's dark matter is made up of Dyson spheres, and that the stars we can see are a "nature preserve".
Totally frivolous, I know. And probably easy to test false.
I just saw an eTrade commercial on MSNBC. The one with all the kids surrounding the dad shouting "Do it! Do it!" as he purchases his first stock.
Some commercials seem to have a lag time on reflecting society.
Unfortunately I was watching LiveTV and MythTV wasn't able to fast forward through the commercial... ;)
That and you can easily get fast and accurate results with paper ballots before midnight as well. It's really not that hard, and worth one nights effort every few years.
Canada votes in 1 week!
There was an Atari emulator that would allow multiple players to play a single game (e.g. MULE) from two net connected computers. Was a bit hard to set up though.
That's correct. The last estimate (2006) for a complete summer Arctic melt was the year 2013.
Before that it was 2038, and before that it was the year 2100...
RAID5 is beaten by:
A) Disaster: Fire. Flood. Earthquake. /" can happen to the best of us.
B) Carless mistake or Idiocy: "rm -r
Nothing but an offsite backup will do.
I'd burn a copy to good quality DVD's in an offsite location (an office drawer at work does the trick for me) as you accumulate data. Replace the media every 5 years, as new media come out.
Just a technical note. With an asteroid this tiny, you don't land on it, you dock with it. The gravity will be practically non-existent.
Probably best to go nose first, nose down. Then you'll be able to see it so you don't hit it so hard.
One of the reasons I stopped reading slashdot was because of the infantile posts on April Fools... now I come back and there's none! World must be ending or something...
The only thing I care about is the cost of BD-R (Blue Ray Writable). We've been waiting a very long time for a replacement for DVD-Rs, and DVD-R9 at decent write speeds are only now becoming both affordable and practical (compared to DVD-R5).
I figure my BD-R threshold is about $5 per disk. Presently they seem to be going for $15-$22 per disk. I'll be willing to buy a BD-R reader/burner when 25GB single layer BD-R's are at $5, which interestingly is the price of CD-Rs when I finally decided to make the switch from floppies in 1996. That was a 450 fold increase in media size. CD-R to DVD-R was a 6 fold increase. I'll be content with another 6 fold increase.
Hopefully BD/BD-R support for MythTV will be available by then.
Agreed. Turing test passing AI is way up there beyond flying cars in predictions that won't come true for a very, VERY long time, if ever. If we're going to see an AI in 20 years, it's going to be biological rather than electronic. This is a problem where no amount of extra computing power you can throw at the problem will solve it. The theory to make it work just isn't there.
If you could show that a machine (say like SETI at home) could pass a Turing test, even if it needed a day to make a reply, I'd believe it was possible. It's just not coming, folks.
politicalcompass.org is awesome.
I love how Barack Obama is on the same point on the political graph as the most right wing party in Canada.
I've had an endoscopy in the last 2 months. Anything smaller than the existing, close to 1cm cables (or so it felt) would have been a vast improvement.
"Hentai Tentacle Porn Oral Rape" would be a suitable description of the experience. I recommend them to all my enemies.
Might be hard to grab samples with a pill though.
I pull that out and play it on emulator every few years. I could never get one of the damned biology missions to work.
I played the IBM CGA graphics version. I've tried getting the C64 version on my GP2X, but it seems glitchy.
Anyone thought of contacting Martin Schweiger over his Orbiter Simulator?
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html
I would **LOVE** to see the ideas implemented in his simulator (real Newtonian physics, Multi Function Display orbital computers, Interplanetary transfer orbits, great physics engine) implenented in a MMO environment.
Maybe... but this screams out more of "Fire Sale! Everything must go!"
Forget the sales numbers of HD-DVD players. Watch the production numbers of HD-DVD disks. If that number stalls or starts dropping this thing is over for sure.
Considering the amount of non-renewable resources is fixed, and that one day we'll be mining our garbage dumps and recycling everything else, one would think that space exploration is necessary from an economical point of view.
At some point in the future, that exponential growth of a market economy and the fixed size of the planet are going to crash, hard. We either transition to a flat, non-growth economy, or leave the planet in search of more resources. It's as simple as that.
Also, The Theory of Gravity is a "theory in crisis", far more so than the Theory of Natural Selection. The inability of physicists to unify general relativity with quantum physics for the past 75 years is a black mark on Einstein's work.
If we were to then use the logic bombs used by the ID crowd, we could conclude that gravity does not exist.
(Insert "Intelligent Falling" joke here).
I have a good friend living in Romania. She's not a scammer, nor works for a scamming company, but because of Romania's label as a scamming country, internet usage can be very hard for her. For instance, Romanian credit cards are worthless on the Internet, even though she will pay for the goods she purchases.
I'm figuring things might get a smidge easier now that Romania is part of the EU. It would still be nice if she could validate in some way that she was a good customer, rather than a "Romanian customer"
Thanks for this... Not many people discuss the Red Queen Hypothesis when talking about evolution, even though sexual selection is a bigger factor in evolution than natural selection.
Disease and Sexual Selection have always, ALWAYS been bigger factors than Natural Selection to determine the course of our evolution since the evolution of sex itself.
A lot has changed in evolutionary theory in the past 30 years. I'd recommend picking up a copy of Matt Ridley's "Red Queen", or at least having a glance at the wikipedia article on the subject.
Considering the Earth is a closed system with a fixed amount of resources, our options for maintaining our way of life include:
1) Significantly reducing the Earth's population, perhaps by a factor of ten. (This includes killing off others and taking their resources)
2) Leaving the Earth to harvest resources elsewhere.
Option 1 at best will maintain our present standard of living. Constant exponential increase in standard living, constrained to the surface of the Earth, is impossible.
Even conservation will at best delay the inevitable.
The C64 was my computer for about 5 years as a kid, from 1983 to 1988. I loved that machine, but went through my fair share of 1541 drive realignments.
:)
I just recently picked up a GP2X F200 (the linux homebrew console from Gamepark Holdings in South Korea), my first ever handheld console at the age of 33. I was ecstatic at the 64 emulation on the device.. it was perfect! I'd played VICE and Frodo on my PC before, but paying games like M.U.L.E., Jumpman and Lode Runner again on a small handheld has made my year. The only problem is that the 1541 drive needs to be emulated as well, so load times can be similar to the original game.
(Oh it also does NES, SNES, SegaCD, Amiga, GBA, NeoGeo, etc etc etc... for you people who are into that kind of thing.)
At the very least, if you owned a C64, go hunt down the VICE emulator. Lots of memories will flood back.
For those of you who don't want to pick up nasty bookseses, pick up a copy of the Orange Box, and play through Half Life 2. Particularly pay attention to the developers commentary in HL2 Episodes One and Two, Portal, and Team Fortress. You'll have a much better appreciation for what level design is and what it means, and (IMHO) Valve is the king of it.
No I am not a Valve Employee.
One more Hubble servicing mission... but the 1.5 billion dollar AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) won't be launched to ISS because there aren't enough remaining Shuttle launches.
Hubble's been fantastic and all, but all the furor, angst and money could have been spent on launching an entirely new telescope into space by now.