Well, maybe it's just me and my Puritan-esque family, but that just doesn't cut it for me. What, the Sierra Club's hikes are too expensive?
Urk! Very frustrating. I've lived in cities all my life but my parents didn't have much trouble insuring that I spent some real time outside of them. As far as my father was concerned, his job wan't done until he left me at a camp site, told me to wait until (a half hour? an hour? don't remember) had passed and that he would meet me at the trail head. Did I have a few terrifying minutes here and there? Yeah, sure. None of them as bad as some time I've spent in Harlem.
I just don't see what excuse people have for raising kids who can't tell a woodsman's blaze from "the cryptic and terrible signs of a UFO".
Admittedly, I'm in an unusually snippy mood tonight, but some days I just want to drop all these folks one by one deep into Idaho with a few MREs, a knife, a shirt-jacket, and a compass (do we give 'em Polaris-Silvas or make 'em sweat?) and tell them that we'll see them back in town.
Not to flog a dead *ahem* horse, but COME ON!
You clearly still don't get the point.
"prehistoric"? My point is that in some cases horses and cows and wooden houses and all that are modern. Advanced. Even, *gasp!* futuristic!
As for this absurd "it's all set in the Old West and thereby irrellevant/obscure" claptrap, clearly you *have not* read the other posts. I'm not going to say all over again the reasons that this is big ol' barrel of hogwash but I will say yet again that it most certainly is.
As to your preferences, both for televison and in life, I can only say that I hope that you are young and will broaden your mind in the years to come.
Moving on as well,
Rustin
I did. Good stuff.
I have fantasies of someday living in a land where all children are raised to understand things like parallax, and shifting perceived color, and basic forest skills. Clearly that land will not be most of America anytime soon.
I love how everyone that posts to slashdot is an armchair expert in whatever they're posting about, be it tv demographics, marketing, computer security, whatever.
Uh, first of all, I hate to break it to you (no, I don't) but some of us *are* experts in TV demographics (see TwirlipOTM), marketing (no certain examples this thred, they turn up), computer security (well, that would be about five percent of/., which, btw, includes most everybody writing, implementing, hacking, or documenting the field), whatever. Ya see, if you check the posts, you'll find fanwing comments from aircraft materials designers, media comments from Wil Wheaton, chip design comments from chip fab experts, and so on.
Kinda reminds me of a party I went to once when somebody got pissed at a comment I made while I was still working on wiring systems for missiles and fighter planes. Some dimwit got snotty and yelled at me, "what are you, a rocket scientist?" and a little cluster of engineers I knew all started laughing and said, "well, actually, yes, he is."
You wanta point that comment at me? Go ahead. My site should give you some of it. Otherwise, bio labs? Let's say that I started as an assistant helper guy at NYU Med Center and last did tech work at (among other places) the genetic engineering labs at Rockefeller University. Hell, even the "what would they be doing with horses" guy sounds like he probably has some relevant tech background.
But even beyond all that, I don't know about you, but I come here to chat. If you care to tell me that the discussions here are even a tenth as off-base, ill-informed, or done by people without professional standing in the subjects being discussed as the appalling grunts and ego ballooning about football sure to be happening all around America this very day, then you simply aren't paying attention. Sure, we ramble; this is our off time. You want formal overviews? Go to the IEEE or APS.
And yes, I really am pissy today, aren't I?
Rustin
Well now, tftp I've got a suggestion for you. Get a fact (any one will do) and come back.
Okay, where do I start? Hmm. . . let' s start with the horses.
First of all, here and now on our own little planet, more and more rural folk are switching *back* to horses or mules. They don't need roads or level ground, they can (if necessary) find their own way home, they can be "fueled" with a much broader range of materials, they are quieter, less polluting, and are self-replicating if you care for them right.
Want some specifics? I can tell you that in Vermont and Oregon, enough small lumber companies are switching back to affect what woods are coming to market, who is willing to have their land selectively lumbered, and how. People are finally learning that sometimes the switch to mechanical tech everywhere is just plain marketing. Are tractors or other mechanical devices better for, say, plowing? Yes, reliably so. Are they better for transportation? Depends on where you're going, what you're carrying, and how soon you need to get there.
Want another example? Police departments all across the industrialized world are switching from cars to a mix of foot patrols, bicycles, horses, SUV-type vehicles, and cars to handle the rest. It turns out that horses are better for crowd control, bikes are the fastest way to move on a crowded city street, and foot patrols are a lot more likely to, for example, notice the anomalous sound that will lead to catching a burglar.
Another? The newest trend in wastewater treatment is fields of reeds and other plants. Cheaper, faster, more reliable. One of the biggest advancements happening in building design is putting plants on the roof. Insulates them, makes the roof last longer, cuts stormwater treatment needs, and cleans the air. The cities of Stuttgart, Toronto, and Chicago have all made greenmantle a major municipal priority. New York City's government just had sixteen (count 'em, sixteen) municipal departments sit down together with a bunch of experts in this stuff and spend a day going over options (and you heard it here first).
In terms of the whole "low-tech" look, I think I covered that one just fine in the post higher up.
Oh, and by the way, what sort of cockamamie ignorant city boy thinks that horses or cows are "low tech"? Do you have any idea at all of the computer power and state of the art infrastructure behind modern cattle breeding? Texas alone has more Star Trek-looking gear for stud work then half the dot coms in California combined. We've got this stuff now, it's called "genetic engineering". Maybe you've heard of it.
Ever been in a biology lab? We've got some real purty stuff now, looks just like real technology and everthin'. Got blinkin' lights and hummin' disk drives and them watchamacallems; you know, oh yeah, parallel processors.
Now personally, I haven't done tech in a bio lab since the early nineties, but even then it was pretty clear that not all the fruits of modern science have QWERTY keyboards attached to them.
So, tell me again, why exactly is it that a backwoods impoverished frontier in the far future will necessarily look like Ronald Reagan's bright shiny idea of a space station?
In a perfect world, Mutant Enemy should take the whole thing in-house, produce episodes in DVD-resolution MPEG-4 format, and offer 'em for sale over the net for two bucks apiece.
Oh god, don't I wish. It would be a beautiful thing to see them loosen the network lease. On top of the obvious stuff, they would then be free to do whatever programming format they wanted. From what I've seen of Joss' style, I bet that he would love to, for example, be able to do a set of eight or ten minute eps on some one thing he's had crawling around in his head and wants to play with. Make 'em one dollar downloads (or less) and keep them up on a heavy duty site just pullin' in the bucks (a little at a time) for decades to come.
Never happen, though, because there's so fucking much piracy in the world, particularly so among Firefly's target audience, that the company would make about six dollars per episode and would go down faster than a two-bit whore.
Well, yes and no. Most revenue for shows like this is either in both being able to have *somebody* put it on the air (that brings in the initial dollars) and long-term syndication and single unit resale (DVD/download, etc.). The problems I see are both lack of a decent micropayment system out there, even now (wtf?) and short term DRM issues that mostly trace back to either the RIAA crowd or BillG. being (as usual) a dick.
In the long run I'm betting (no metaphor there since my company's future depends on it) that both of these issue will be resolved.
Oh brother, it's that whole "why do they have to make it look like the American West bullshit again! I am so sick of this pathetic ignorant claptrap.
Okay, let's start with the whole clothing thing. Do you know what herders and ranchers wore in the old Roman Empire? Hmmm....try big floppy hats, leather breaches, heavy footwear, and usually carrying around lengths of rope or leather that they were using to tie things closed/harness animals/etc.
Oh, but that's gotta be an exception. Yeah, sure.
South American "cowboys"? Same thing.
China, modern backwoods or just old days backwoods? Same thing.
Europe in the Middle Ages? Take a look and there it is.
Do I need to keep going or have I made my point?
When you're in the sticks and tech and money are in uncoomfortably low supply you wear leather or equivalent because it's tough, flexible, and comparatively soft. You wear big hats because they keep the sun and wind and rain off; you probably wear ones made of soft fabric so you can pull down the sides or push them up or simply because even if they start out crisp, they don't stay that way. You wear a few bits of "fancy" patterned fabric because it doesn't show the dirt while still letting you go into town. Heavy boots or shoes should be obvious. Rope should be too. A mid-sized knife, ready to hand, is just gonna happen. Thick but short gloves, some kind of scarf. All of these are just the choices that become self-evident when you're doing that kind of thing.
Heavy frame houses with dropped in bits of ornament and dusty windows come along too.
Back when I was a wee lad I was taught to call a bandana an "A.P.", as in "all purpose". That's because we were taught to use them for everydamnthing. Since then I've used them as hats, headbands, bags, liquid carriers (for short distances), tie-downs, cushions, placemats, wrapping for stuff from machine tools to chopsticks, bandages, dust covers, and more. And that's just stuff I've done while living (pretty much) in the city. The same is true of a dozen other "western" cliches.
Personally, I tend more towards what people think of as modern English country (baggy tweed jacket, long substantial scarf, twill pants or jeans, lighter shoes but still heavy socks) but I'll tell you that I reached that because I found that it worked. The style came after the function; not the other way around.
The "western" look predates the white/black/hispanic settling of the American West by thousands of years and will still be current out at the ass edge of wherever as long as there continues to be such a place.
Think about it. They zoom up to a solar system and bang, they're at the planet. How much time would they have to stop and stand there to watch which way the planets are going to calculate new orbits?
Um, how about, "as long as they need"? They're working for a famously obsessive scientist who just finished reaming them out about having to be sure of everything because they are choosing a planet to be utterly obliterated and reconstructed on the subatomic level.
Yup, it's bothered me too since the moment I saw the scene. "Botany Bay? Botany Bay?!?" Checkov, you're a dimwit.
At the very least. The circumstances of Khan's stranding and the use of shipping containers as transfer vessels always made it obvious to me that there would without a doubt have to be damn near indestructable transceivers sent down with the "genetic criminals" with a heavy duty "Stay away! Stay away! Very very bad people here" IFF* on permanent repeat and designed to be unreachable/unmodifiable by Khan's crew.
But then, I lost hope of ST making sense when they had them in those big-ass space suits that were supposedly for maintenance work back in the first ST movie. Even then I knew enough to know that suit design was heading towards something closer to bike shorts material or current wet suits then to anything that bulky.
The only thing that redeemed the tech for me was the whole idea of a major plot point being built around the importance of understanding systems and how they can be hacked. After all this is the movie with both:
"You have to learn why things work the way they do on a starship" and "I got a commendation for original thinking".**
How could I *not* love a movie that revealed that James Tiberius was a hacker?
*Identify Friend/Foe - automated and extremely standardized signal output device whose sole purpose is to say "This is me. I'm a (blah) registry, (foo) type vessel of reg number (zorch)
**(Those quotes refer to hacking the command systems of the Reliant and reprogramming the simulator for the Kobiashi Maru test for those of you with lives)
Yup, as the old Be OS pocket protectors say: "We be geeks".
Rustin
Okay, so I read the Colonel Halt (love the name) transcript, looked at the photos, looked at the interviews and . ..
What a pile of self-deluding baloney!
Read the transcript. None of those guys knew how to use their gear, they couldn't even find enough flashlights, they didn't know the territory. I wouldn't trust those guys to tell me how many buttons were on their shirtfronts.
Stuff hovering over Mexico City? Maybe.
Weird sh*t at Roswell (even beyond it's being a military test site)? Yes, something seriously hinky was going on.
Pilots saying that there's a lot in the sky that looks UFO-ish to them? I'm not in a position to judge.
But this thing? Yeah, right. I'll trade ya my secret decoder ring for your deed to the Brooklyn Bridge and then we'll go investigate.
Posting while I eat, like a true obsessive/.er,
Rustin
You don't bring out a product at one time which reads PC and Mac floppy disks, which is called a SuperDrive, and then later bring out a DVD-RW and also call it a superdrive. Call it a SuperMegaDrive, or stick it up your ass and whistle, but don't call it a SuperDrive.
I agree; that annoyed me like the dickens myself. But you gotta give 'em credit for having called the drive chip for the *original* high density floppy drive the "Super Woz Interface Module" i.e. SWIM. In all those years of the wintel folks giving chips names like TI-78 Foo Interface Driver System , it was always comforting to read specs from Apple.
Of course, now the rest of the world has chips with names like Dragonball Z and Apple just makes iWhatever. *sigh*.
Rustin
I wonder how they plan to track purchases made with cash?
Outlaw cash transactions.
I wish that that were actually funny. I'm assuming that we'll start to see just that, with certain types of purchases (such as airline tickets) only being allowed through some electronically trackable means. This administration means business and they have repeatedly shown that they are entirely willing to do things that would have been dismissed as ludicrous less then a year ago.
Yeah, yeah, "Good for all debts public and private". Whatever. Stop thinking that your standards are theirs or, in fact, that illegality or irrationality make something impossible.
The Homeland (yeah, right) Security Act has plenty of provisions that most of us would dismiss out of hand in any other context.
The White House is very, very serious indeed and they are the progeny of Iran-Contra, the Watergate break ins, and a hundred other proofs that, yes, they can get away with it.
No games anymore, folks. Simulation is over and this is certainly not a drill.
So, any estimates on how soon they go after any successor to Beanz and the like for being too transferrable and not trackable enough? Any predictions on how many anonymizers for purchases we're going to see? Since credit card anonymizers for porn are under attack the game is already under way.
I predict a system cropping up where you can walk into a storefront and buy a "corporate credit card" with an anonymous name or equivalent and a predeposited balance. Say, a $500 card made out to Joe Foobar with a confirmable balance. Use up the balance and either throw it away or go to any branch and put more cash into this identity. No questions, no ID needed, no fuss, no muss. I'm betting that one of the pawn shop companies currently going national (there are several) will get into this and that they will start having spammer-style constant swapping to new Visa or MCd providers. I'll also bet that this will become illegal within three years and keep existing under a succession of forms. Further, I'll bet that we're going to start seeing a serious increase in Americans with foreign bank accounts that come with credit cards. Sure, I've got a Visa; Bank of Rome, thank you very much.
Yes, cyberpunk is ever more real by the day and I fucking HATE IT. But I'm not going to be stupid enough to deny that it is happening.
Rustin
Yeah, a normal phone system and pamphlets at the UNDP outpost wouldn't work at all for finding out those things.
Actually in most cases, no it wouldn't. Supply side control is always less efficient at supplying information than demand side. Would you want somebody deciding for you what you wanted to read?
Back in the Fifties they started having what we would now call black studies sections in urban libraries. But all of them were stocked by librarians elsewhere who first decided what "those Negros" would want and then sent it to them. It wasn't until I think, 1970, that a hippie librarian (well, actually, my mother) put together the funding to get a city library located in an SRO (single room occupancy hotel, i.e. fleabag) in a black neighborhood and ask the local library users what they wanted. Surprise, surprise! they wanted entirely different stuff.
We all are so fiercely protective of our freedom to use the Internet as we choose, not be questioned about what we check out at the library, and so forth, but somehow when it comes to getting information to the truly desperate, we turn patriarchal (matriarchal?) and assume that we should decide for them.
Give 'em tools. And step back. Rustin
I don't know. I'm not too hot on this device in particular, but the greater situation reminds me of the early days of computers in American schools. Most people looked at them once, and avoided them as "weird" from then on. A few people got more and more into it and learned ways (such as using the machine in the middle of the night) to get hours and hours of time.
This is where legitimate elitism comes in. Yeah, most people will benefit very little in the short run, though even they will gain from having a better conduit to the outside world. A small but growing proportion will use it as their tool out of the god-forsaken holes they're in and we'll *all* be better off for it.
Don't think of this as trying to provide Pentiums for everybody. Think of them as PDP-11s at some obscure college in a 1970's hick town. Totally different dynamic.
Oh, and as for batteries, they're not complete morons. There are plenty of people in India capable of buying a fifteen dollar solar battery charger. What is more likely is that (as my friend Josh pointed out about the Eighties in NYC's Lower East Side) charged batteries will become currency. My big concern would be trying to ensure that any other electronic devices sent to the same villages used the same size batteries to increase the vaibility of this very economically healthy medium of trade. Rustin
Yes, and my thought was, hmmm.. how much does a sybian-based phone with keyboard, color screen, text messaging and multi-protocol phone go for these days? By the time these folks are up and running the Nokia 9210s and their less-expensive cousins will be getting down to about the same price range.
Hey, the Simputer people *sorta* have their hearts in the right place, but capitalism will be providing this stuff just fine in a few years anyway. They'ld probably be better off buying up tons of old Palms and Newtons with some of their millions and using them to get working computers out there NOW rather than creating yet another platform. People seem to forget that an *authorized* licence of pretty much any non-Microslime OS can be had for five or six dollars in quantity if you're willing to get stuff a few releases back. What do you think copies of Mac OS System 6 are going for these days? Wanna bet that there isn't some school out there that converted to Windoze years ago and would sell them for the cost of shipping?
Looks a bit like hubris to me. Kinda reminds me of when Brazil went into the car manufacturing business.
Wishing the people of India well but doubting that a non-profit, NIH-obsessed bunch of do-gooders is the way to go,
Rustin
Re:Send the Sales VP to California!
on
Solar Power Play
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· Score: 2
Ahh, another clueless theoretician in search of a spherical cow.
First of all, NOBODY literally proposed laying PV over the entirety of the Mojave. But evidently you feel the need to get snitty. So be it.
Listen, Aristotle, it is nothing even resembling "trivial". The relevant thermodymamics are NOT 20% withdrawn versus nothing withdrawn. That, as something like twenty posters on this thread have already explained, starts from the utterly fallacious assumption that otherwise the energy would be "perfectly" and instantly distributed and that only by adding the EEEEVIIL photovoltaics would any redistribution take place.
You wanna get salty? Yeah. It would have an effect. Again as others have pointed out, it would actually be somewhat similar to what would happen if the same area was to be successfully planted and irrigated, a thing that would, in fact be highly desirable. It would cut down on daytime peaks (and, btw, on heat loss to reflection back into space) and provide a helpful insulating "second skin" that would even things out more at night and, in fact, also result in significant condensation out of the air, that could then be put into the ground and would certainly promote plant growth and AGAIN be considered a serious gain.
Have you ever dealt with metal frames or other equipment in the desert? That gives you a good starting point. Shade underneath, some heat absorption, leveling of temperature, moderation of winds. You know, the stuff that settlers to an area reliably try desperately hard to induce.
Now back when I was sitting through the environmental impact hearings that Atlantic Richfield did for their desert region solar installations way back in, was it '78? I was under the impression that the impact of such systems was quite well analyzed and comprehensively, as I have briefly explained above, desirable. Contrary to what you are asserting.
Negative impacts? Sure. The glare (I'm not kidding about this) does no favors at all to predator birds or, for that matter, pilots. There are some others, but the "self-evident" stuff you claim is just so much hogwash. (But what would I know? I only spoke then with biologists with expertise in desert biomes, one of whom went on to become a state regulator.)
(BTW, I'll send a six-pack of brew of choice to the person who tracks down those EIS hearings and finds out what questions I asked of ARCO.)
Yet again, I ask, where are your FACTS? Give me actual cases of photovoltaic installations, active or passive, causing adverse effects on surrounding areas. Power generation *always* involves conversion of energy. Duh! And the amount of thermal impact is primarily proportional to the power generated, not the geographical distribution of the load. This is why the early efforts to "help" by building taller smokestacks and longer effluent pipes are now seen to have been so destructive.
Come back when you have real world data. The rest of us on this thread have made it eminently clear that we do. Pony up or fold.
Frankly, no matter what you respond though, I won't be posting again tonight as I have to prepare for the conference on technological responses to and impacts upon global warming that I am attending tomorrow.
Rustin
Oh, please. It's a CHEAP computer in every sense. It's mean to be sold to clueless masses with no cash and no skills, not somebody looking to replace their PIII with custom everything.
It's gonna use the lowest cost stuff they can find and you know what? That's entirely appropriate. Get over it.
Rustin
but it is very unlikely that households will invest 8-9K on a new untested technology
"new"?
"untested"?
How could PV be considered either? This stuff has been around and in reliable use since the Fifties.
Hate to break to ya, son (no, I don't) but over a dozen companies out there are gearing up to make photovoltaic solar-powered roof shingles and they aren't doing it for the good of humanity either. Just plain old profit.
Facts, folks. Don't waste our time with ignorant speculation. Start by getting FACTS.
Rustin
Re:Send the Sales VP to California!
on
Solar Power Play
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· Score: 2
Give us an example of this having actually happened. And remember, your example has to be at least as large in impact relative to watt added to the grid as you would get from, say, the effects of a diesel-powered plant. Real world. Not foolishness.
Just to give you a starting point, try comparing the california wind farms to the enormous amounts of heated water let out into rivers at even test and research reactors.
And let's not forget the slowest speech ever on ST, in the first movie, when they are caught in the wormhole.
Fi-re - Pho-ton - tor - pe -dos.
Be-lay - that - or-der!
and so on. Hoo boy was I grateful when they finally got to . ..
Pho -ton - tor-pe-dos - - a - WAYYYY!
My god. It's been twenty-two years and I'm *still* annoyed.
Rustin
I thought geeks who need to get a life were obsessed with Na ^H^H Wil Wheaton?
Naw, only if they are fans of his his site.
Of course, what's funny about this is that Wheaton has turned out to be a pretty decent geek. Actually into things like applet functionality and server optimization. Unlike, say Jamie "how does that Internet thing work?" Doohan.
Here's to you, Wil, Geekboy indeed. He DOESN'T just play one on TV.
Given your general willingness to have strong opinions and your role in the ever-expanding world of Tek War, not to mention your playing T.J. Hooker, how do you feel about the virtual disappearance of the so-called War on Drugs since September 11th?
Rustin
Slashdot Mirror
Well, maybe it's just me and my Puritan-esque family, but that just doesn't cut it for me. What, the Sierra Club's hikes are too expensive?
Urk! Very frustrating. I've lived in cities all my life but my parents didn't have much trouble insuring that I spent some real time outside of them. As far as my father was concerned, his job wan't done until he left me at a camp site, told me to wait until (a half hour? an hour? don't remember) had passed and that he would meet me at the trail head. Did I have a few terrifying minutes here and there? Yeah, sure. None of them as bad as some time I've spent in Harlem.
I just don't see what excuse people have for raising kids who can't tell a woodsman's blaze from "the cryptic and terrible signs of a UFO".
Admittedly, I'm in an unusually snippy mood tonight, but some days I just want to drop all these folks one by one deep into Idaho with a few MREs, a knife, a shirt-jacket, and a compass (do we give 'em Polaris-Silvas or make 'em sweat?) and tell them that we'll see them back in town.
Gol-dang-candy-assed, no good, stream-polluting, SUV-driving, garbage-leaving, backwoods-paving, flush toilet-dependent, water-wasting, mutter, mutter, grumble, bitch . . .
Rustin
Yep. With the genyooine full color guaronteeed authentic picture of Buck Rogers in the Twenty-fourth Century and everything.
Not to flog a dead *ahem* horse, but COME ON!
You clearly still don't get the point.
"prehistoric"? My point is that in some cases horses and cows and wooden houses and all that are modern. Advanced. Even, *gasp!* futuristic!
As for this absurd "it's all set in the Old West and thereby irrellevant/obscure" claptrap, clearly you *have not* read the other posts. I'm not going to say all over again the reasons that this is big ol' barrel of hogwash but I will say yet again that it most certainly is.
As to your preferences, both for televison and in life, I can only say that I hope that you are young and will broaden your mind in the years to come.
Moving on as well,
Rustin
I did. Good stuff.
I have fantasies of someday living in a land where all children are raised to understand things like parallax, and shifting perceived color, and basic forest skills. Clearly that land will not be most of America anytime soon.
I love how everyone that posts to slashdot is an armchair expert in whatever they're posting about, be it tv demographics, marketing, computer security, whatever. /., which, btw, includes most everybody writing, implementing, hacking, or documenting the field), whatever.
Uh, first of all, I hate to break it to you (no, I don't) but some of us *are* experts in TV demographics (see TwirlipOTM), marketing (no certain examples this thred, they turn up), computer security (well, that would be about five percent of
Ya see, if you check the posts, you'll find fanwing comments from aircraft materials designers, media comments from Wil Wheaton, chip design comments from chip fab experts, and so on.
Kinda reminds me of a party I went to once when somebody got pissed at a comment I made while I was still working on wiring systems for missiles and fighter planes. Some dimwit got snotty and yelled at me, "what are you, a rocket scientist?" and a little cluster of engineers I knew all started laughing and said, "well, actually, yes, he is."
You wanta point that comment at me? Go ahead. My site should give you some of it. Otherwise, bio labs? Let's say that I started as an assistant helper guy at NYU Med Center and last did tech work at (among other places) the genetic engineering labs at Rockefeller University.
Hell, even the "what would they be doing with horses" guy sounds like he probably has some relevant tech background.
But even beyond all that, I don't know about you, but I come here to chat. If you care to tell me that the discussions here are even a tenth as off-base, ill-informed, or done by people without professional standing in the subjects being discussed as the appalling grunts and ego ballooning about football sure to be happening all around America this very day, then you simply aren't paying attention. Sure, we ramble; this is our off time. You want formal overviews? Go to the IEEE or APS.
And yes, I really am pissy today, aren't I?
Rustin
Well now, tftp I've got a suggestion for you. Get a fact (any one will do) and come back.
Okay, where do I start? Hmm. . . let' s start with the horses.
First of all, here and now on our own little planet, more and more rural folk are switching *back* to horses or mules. They don't need roads or level ground, they can (if necessary) find their own way home, they can be "fueled" with a much broader range of materials, they are quieter, less polluting, and are self-replicating if you care for them right.
Want some specifics? I can tell you that in Vermont and Oregon, enough small lumber companies are switching back to affect what woods are coming to market, who is willing to have their land selectively lumbered, and how. People are finally learning that sometimes the switch to mechanical tech everywhere is just plain marketing. Are tractors or other mechanical devices better for, say, plowing? Yes, reliably so. Are they better for transportation? Depends on where you're going, what you're carrying, and how soon you need to get there.
Want another example? Police departments all across the industrialized world are switching from cars to a mix of foot patrols, bicycles, horses, SUV-type vehicles, and cars to handle the rest. It turns out that horses are better for crowd control, bikes are the fastest way to move on a crowded city street, and foot patrols are a lot more likely to, for example, notice the anomalous sound that will lead to catching a burglar.
Another? The newest trend in wastewater treatment is fields of reeds and other plants. Cheaper, faster, more reliable. One of the biggest advancements happening in building design is putting plants on the roof. Insulates them, makes the roof last longer, cuts stormwater treatment needs, and cleans the air. The cities of Stuttgart, Toronto, and Chicago have all made greenmantle a major municipal priority. New York City's government just had sixteen (count 'em, sixteen) municipal departments sit down together with a bunch of experts in this stuff and spend a day going over options (and you heard it here first).
In terms of the whole "low-tech" look, I think I covered that one just fine in the post higher up.
Oh, and by the way, what sort of cockamamie ignorant city boy thinks that horses or cows are "low tech"? Do you have any idea at all of the computer power and state of the art infrastructure behind modern cattle breeding? Texas alone has more Star Trek-looking gear for stud work then half the dot coms in California combined. We've got this stuff now, it's called "genetic engineering". Maybe you've heard of it.
Ever been in a biology lab? We've got some real purty stuff now, looks just like real technology and everthin'. Got blinkin' lights and hummin' disk drives and them watchamacallems; you know, oh yeah, parallel processors.
Now personally, I haven't done tech in a bio lab since the early nineties, but even then it was pretty clear that not all the fruits of modern science have QWERTY keyboards attached to them.
So, tell me again, why exactly is it that a backwoods impoverished frontier in the far future will necessarily look like Ronald Reagan's bright shiny idea of a space station?
Rustin
In a perfect world, Mutant Enemy should take the whole thing in-house, produce episodes in DVD-resolution MPEG-4 format, and offer 'em for sale over the net for two bucks apiece.
Oh god, don't I wish. It would be a beautiful thing to see them loosen the network lease. On top of the obvious stuff, they would then be free to do whatever programming format they wanted. From what I've seen of Joss' style, I bet that he would love to, for example, be able to do a set of eight or ten minute eps on some one thing he's had crawling around in his head and wants to play with. Make 'em one dollar downloads (or less) and keep them up on a heavy duty site just pullin' in the bucks (a little at a time) for decades to come.
Never happen, though, because there's so fucking much piracy in the world, particularly so among Firefly's target audience, that the company would make about six dollars per episode and would go down faster than a two-bit whore.
Well, yes and no. Most revenue for shows like this is either in both being able to have *somebody* put it on the air (that brings in the initial dollars) and long-term syndication and single unit resale (DVD/download, etc.). The problems I see are both lack of a decent micropayment system out there, even now (wtf?) and short term DRM issues that mostly trace back to either the RIAA crowd or BillG. being (as usual) a dick.
In the long run I'm betting (no metaphor there since my company's future depends on it) that both of these issue will be resolved.
Here's hopin'
Rustin
Oh brother, it's that whole "why do they have to make it look like the American West bullshit again! I am so sick of this pathetic ignorant claptrap.
Okay, let's start with the whole clothing thing. Do you know what herders and ranchers wore in the old Roman Empire? Hmmm....try big floppy hats, leather breaches, heavy footwear, and usually carrying around lengths of rope or leather that they were using to tie things closed/harness animals/etc.
Oh, but that's gotta be an exception. Yeah, sure.
South American "cowboys"? Same thing.
China, modern backwoods or just old days backwoods? Same thing.
Europe in the Middle Ages? Take a look and there it is.
Do I need to keep going or have I made my point?
When you're in the sticks and tech and money are in uncoomfortably low supply you wear leather or equivalent because it's tough, flexible, and comparatively soft. You wear big hats because they keep the sun and wind and rain off; you probably wear ones made of soft fabric so you can pull down the sides or push them up or simply because even if they start out crisp, they don't stay that way. You wear a few bits of "fancy" patterned fabric because it doesn't show the dirt while still letting you go into town. Heavy boots or shoes should be obvious. Rope should be too. A mid-sized knife, ready to hand, is just gonna happen. Thick but short gloves, some kind of scarf. All of these are just the choices that become self-evident when you're doing that kind of thing.
Heavy frame houses with dropped in bits of ornament and dusty windows come along too.
Back when I was a wee lad I was taught to call a bandana an "A.P.", as in "all purpose". That's because we were taught to use them for everydamnthing. Since then I've used them as hats, headbands, bags, liquid carriers (for short distances), tie-downs, cushions, placemats, wrapping for stuff from machine tools to chopsticks, bandages, dust covers, and more. And that's just stuff I've done while living (pretty much) in the city. The same is true of a dozen other "western" cliches.
Personally, I tend more towards what people think of as modern English country (baggy tweed jacket, long substantial scarf, twill pants or jeans, lighter shoes but still heavy socks) but I'll tell you that I reached that because I found that it worked. The style came after the function; not the other way around.
The "western" look predates the white/black/hispanic settling of the American West by thousands of years and will still be current out at the ass edge of wherever as long as there continues to be such a place.
There. Are we done now?
Rustin
Think about it. They zoom up to a solar system and bang, they're at the planet. How much time would they have to stop and stand there to watch which way the planets are going to calculate new orbits?
Um, how about, "as long as they need"? They're working for a famously obsessive scientist who just finished reaming them out about having to be sure of everything because they are choosing a planet to be utterly obliterated and reconstructed on the subatomic level.
Yup, it's bothered me too since the moment I saw the scene.
"Botany Bay? Botany Bay ?!?" Checkov, you're a dimwit.
At the very least. The circumstances of Khan's stranding and the use of shipping containers as transfer vessels always made it obvious to me that there would without a doubt have to be damn near indestructable transceivers sent down with the "genetic criminals" with a heavy duty "Stay away! Stay away! Very very bad people here" IFF* on permanent repeat and designed to be unreachable/unmodifiable by Khan's crew.
But then, I lost hope of ST making sense when they had them in those big-ass space suits that were supposedly for maintenance work back in the first ST movie. Even then I knew enough to know that suit design was heading towards something closer to bike shorts material or current wet suits then to anything that bulky.
The only thing that redeemed the tech for me was the whole idea of a major plot point being built around the importance of understanding systems and how they can be hacked. After all this is the movie with both:
"You have to learn why things work the way they do on a starship" and "I got a commendation for original thinking".**
How could I *not* love a movie that revealed that James Tiberius was a hacker?
*Identify Friend/Foe - automated and extremely standardized signal output device whose sole purpose is to say "This is me. I'm a (blah) registry, (foo) type vessel of reg number (zorch)
**(Those quotes refer to hacking the command systems of the Reliant and reprogramming the simulator for the Kobiashi Maru test for those of you with lives)
Yup, as the old Be OS pocket protectors say: "We be geeks".
Rustin
Okay, so I read the Colonel Halt (love the name) transcript, looked at the photos, looked at the interviews and . . .
/.er,
What a pile of self-deluding baloney!
Read the transcript. None of those guys knew how to use their gear, they couldn't even find enough flashlights, they didn't know the territory. I wouldn't trust those guys to tell me how many buttons were on their shirtfronts.
Stuff hovering over Mexico City? Maybe.
Weird sh*t at Roswell (even beyond it's being a military test site)? Yes, something seriously hinky was going on.
Pilots saying that there's a lot in the sky that looks UFO-ish to them? I'm not in a position to judge.
But this thing? Yeah, right. I'll trade ya my secret decoder ring for your deed to the Brooklyn Bridge and then we'll go investigate.
Posting while I eat, like a true obsessive
Rustin
You don't bring out a product at one time which reads PC and Mac floppy disks, which is called a SuperDrive, and then later bring out a DVD-RW and also call it a superdrive. Call it a SuperMegaDrive, or stick it up your ass and whistle, but don't call it a SuperDrive.
I agree; that annoyed me like the dickens myself. But you gotta give 'em credit for having called the drive chip for the *original* high density floppy drive the "Super Woz Interface Module" i.e. SWIM. In all those years of the wintel folks giving chips names like TI-78 Foo Interface Driver System , it was always comforting to read specs from Apple.
Of course, now the rest of the world has chips with names like Dragonball Z and Apple just makes iWhatever.
*sigh*.
Rustin
I wonder how they plan to track purchases made with cash?
Outlaw cash transactions.
I wish that that were actually funny. I'm assuming that we'll start to see just that, with certain types of purchases (such as airline tickets) only being allowed through some electronically trackable means. This administration means business and they have repeatedly shown that they are entirely willing to do things that would have been dismissed as ludicrous less then a year ago.
Yeah, yeah, "Good for all debts public and private". Whatever. Stop thinking that your standards are theirs or, in fact, that illegality or irrationality make something impossible.
The Homeland (yeah, right) Security Act has plenty of provisions that most of us would dismiss out of hand in any other context.
The White House is very, very serious indeed and they are the progeny of Iran-Contra, the Watergate break ins, and a hundred other proofs that, yes, they can get away with it.
No games anymore, folks. Simulation is over and this is certainly not a drill.
So, any estimates on how soon they go after any successor to Beanz and the like for being too transferrable and not trackable enough? Any predictions on how many anonymizers for purchases we're going to see? Since credit card anonymizers for porn are under attack the game is already under way.
I predict a system cropping up where you can walk into a storefront and buy a "corporate credit card" with an anonymous name or equivalent and a predeposited balance. Say, a $500 card made out to Joe Foobar with a confirmable balance. Use up the balance and either throw it away or go to any branch and put more cash into this identity. No questions, no ID needed, no fuss, no muss. I'm betting that one of the pawn shop companies currently going national (there are several) will get into this and that they will start having spammer-style constant swapping to new Visa or MCd providers. I'll also bet that this will become illegal within three years and keep existing under a succession of forms. Further, I'll bet that we're going to start seeing a serious increase in Americans with foreign bank accounts that come with credit cards. Sure, I've got a Visa; Bank of Rome, thank you very much.
Yes, cyberpunk is ever more real by the day and I fucking HATE IT. But I'm not going to be stupid enough to deny that it is happening.
Rustin
Yeah, a normal phone system and pamphlets at the UNDP outpost wouldn't work at all for finding out those things.
Actually in most cases, no it wouldn't. Supply side control is always less efficient at supplying information than demand side. Would you want somebody deciding for you what you wanted to read?
Back in the Fifties they started having what we would now call black studies sections in urban libraries. But all of them were stocked by librarians elsewhere who first decided what "those Negros" would want and then sent it to them. It wasn't until I think, 1970, that a hippie librarian (well, actually, my mother) put together the funding to get a city library located in an SRO (single room occupancy hotel, i.e. fleabag) in a black neighborhood and ask the local library users what they wanted.
Surprise, surprise! they wanted entirely different stuff.
We all are so fiercely protective of our freedom to use the Internet as we choose, not be questioned about what we check out at the library, and so forth, but somehow when it comes to getting information to the truly desperate, we turn patriarchal (matriarchal?) and assume that we should decide for them.
Give 'em tools. And step back.
Rustin
I don't know. I'm not too hot on this device in particular, but the greater situation reminds me of the early days of computers in American schools. Most people looked at them once, and avoided them as "weird" from then on. A few people got more and more into it and learned ways (such as using the machine in the middle of the night) to get hours and hours of time.
This is where legitimate elitism comes in. Yeah, most people will benefit very little in the short run, though even they will gain from having a better conduit to the outside world. A small but growing proportion will use it as their tool out of the god-forsaken holes they're in and we'll *all* be better off for it.
Don't think of this as trying to provide Pentiums for everybody. Think of them as PDP-11s at some obscure college in a 1970's hick town. Totally different dynamic.
Oh, and as for batteries, they're not complete morons. There are plenty of people in India capable of buying a fifteen dollar solar battery charger. What is more likely is that (as my friend Josh pointed out about the Eighties in NYC's Lower East Side) charged batteries will become currency. My big concern would be trying to ensure that any other electronic devices sent to the same villages used the same size batteries to increase the vaibility of this very economically healthy medium of trade.
Rustin
So concluding that you were an asshole, you just had to share it with the rest of us anyway, didn't ya?
Yes, and my thought was, hmmm.. how much does a sybian-based phone with keyboard, color screen, text messaging and multi-protocol phone go for these days? By the time these folks are up and running the Nokia 9210s and their less-expensive cousins will be getting down to about the same price range.
Hey, the Simputer people *sorta* have their hearts in the right place, but capitalism will be providing this stuff just fine in a few years anyway.
They'ld probably be better off buying up tons of old Palms and Newtons with some of their millions and using them to get working computers out there NOW rather than creating yet another platform. People seem to forget that an *authorized* licence of pretty much any non-Microslime OS can be had for five or six dollars in quantity if you're willing to get stuff a few releases back. What do you think copies of Mac OS System 6 are going for these days? Wanna bet that there isn't some school out there that converted to Windoze years ago and would sell them for the cost of shipping?
Looks a bit like hubris to me. Kinda reminds me of when Brazil went into the car manufacturing business.
Wishing the people of India well but doubting that a non-profit, NIH-obsessed bunch of do-gooders is the way to go,
Rustin
Ahh, another clueless theoretician in search of a spherical cow.
First of all, NOBODY literally proposed laying PV over the entirety of the Mojave. But evidently you feel the need to get snitty. So be it.
Listen, Aristotle, it is nothing even resembling "trivial". The relevant thermodymamics are NOT 20% withdrawn versus nothing withdrawn. That, as something like twenty posters on this thread have already explained, starts from the utterly fallacious assumption that otherwise the energy would be "perfectly" and instantly distributed and that only by adding the EEEEVIIL photovoltaics would any redistribution take place.
You wanna get salty? Yeah. It would have an effect. Again as others have pointed out, it would actually be somewhat similar to what would happen if the same area was to be successfully planted and irrigated, a thing that would, in fact be highly desirable. It would cut down on daytime peaks (and, btw, on heat loss to reflection back into space) and provide a helpful insulating "second skin" that would even things out more at night and, in fact, also result in significant condensation out of the air, that could then be put into the ground and would certainly promote plant growth and AGAIN be considered a serious gain.
Have you ever dealt with metal frames or other equipment in the desert? That gives you a good starting point. Shade underneath, some heat absorption, leveling of temperature, moderation of winds. You know, the stuff that settlers to an area reliably try desperately hard to induce.
Now back when I was sitting through the environmental impact hearings that Atlantic Richfield did for their desert region solar installations way back in, was it '78? I was under the impression that the impact of such systems was quite well analyzed and comprehensively, as I have briefly explained above, desirable. Contrary to what you are asserting.
Negative impacts? Sure. The glare (I'm not kidding about this) does no favors at all to predator birds or, for that matter, pilots. There are some others, but the "self-evident" stuff you claim is just so much hogwash. (But what would I know? I only spoke then with biologists with expertise in desert biomes, one of whom went on to become a state regulator.)
(BTW, I'll send a six-pack of brew of choice to the person who tracks down those EIS hearings and finds out what questions I asked of ARCO.)
Yet again, I ask, where are your FACTS? Give me actual cases of photovoltaic installations, active or passive, causing adverse effects on surrounding areas. Power generation *always* involves conversion of energy. Duh! And the amount of thermal impact is primarily proportional to the power generated, not the geographical distribution of the load. This is why the early efforts to "help" by building taller smokestacks and longer effluent pipes are now seen to have been so destructive.
Come back when you have real world data. The rest of us on this thread have made it eminently clear that we do. Pony up or fold.
Frankly, no matter what you respond though, I won't be posting again tonight as I have to prepare for the conference on technological responses to and impacts upon global warming that I am attending tomorrow.
Rustin
I don't get it. Where are the "eats for the desperate computerist"?
I thought that this was a comment on something like the Dilberito.
Rustin
Oh, please. It's a CHEAP computer in every sense. It's mean to be sold to clueless masses with no cash and no skills, not somebody looking to replace their PIII with custom everything.
It's gonna use the lowest cost stuff they can find and you know what? That's entirely appropriate. Get over it.
Rustin
but it is very unlikely that households will invest 8-9K on a new untested technology
"new"?
"untested"?
How could PV be considered either? This stuff has been around and in reliable use since the Fifties.
Hate to break to ya, son (no, I don't) but over a dozen companies out there are gearing up to make photovoltaic solar-powered roof shingles and they aren't doing it for the good of humanity either. Just plain old profit.
Facts, folks. Don't waste our time with ignorant speculation. Start by getting FACTS.
Rustin
Give us an example of this having actually happened. And remember, your example has to be at least as large in impact relative to watt added to the grid as you would get from, say, the effects of a diesel-powered plant.
Real world. Not foolishness.
Just to give you a starting point, try comparing the california wind farms to the enormous amounts of heated water let out into rivers at even test and research reactors.
And let's not forget the slowest speech ever on ST, in the first movie, when they are caught in the wormhole. .
Fi-re - Pho-ton - tor - pe -dos.
Be-lay - that - or-der!
and so on.
Hoo boy was I grateful when they finally got to . .
Pho -ton - tor-pe-dos - - a - WAYYYY!
My god. It's been twenty-two years and I'm *still* annoyed.
Rustin
Seeing as most /.ers are straight males, I bet the slashdot poll would say "Janeway".
For once, it sure as shootin' wouldn't be "Cowboy Neal".
I thought geeks who need to get a life were obsessed with Na ^H^H Wil Wheaton?
Naw, only if they are fans of his his site.
Of course, what's funny about this is that Wheaton has turned out to be a pretty decent geek. Actually into things like applet functionality and server optimization. Unlike, say Jamie "how does that Internet thing work?" Doohan.
Here's to you, Wil, Geekboy indeed. He DOESN'T just play one on TV.
Rustin
Given your general willingness to have strong opinions and your role in the ever-expanding world of Tek War, not to mention your playing T.J. Hooker, how do you feel about the virtual disappearance of the so-called War on Drugs since September 11th?
Rustin