I understand your hopeful, forward-looking attitude, but like many before you the view is deeply flawed.
The most glaring problems:
There is no a priori reason to believe that "many of the irrational issues we have here that are causing sustainability problems could be avoided up there." Quite the contrary. The same reasons will be dragged up there.
There is no wind or water flow to dissipate pollutants, so the claim that "pollution that is causing problems on Earth will be a non-issue since the sheer volume of space available out there will make dumping easy" is, to put it mildly, unfounded. It constitutes the dumping of enormous amounts of mass that would persist in the vicinity of the colony.
The remark "I don't think you'd want any animals out there, except as a luxury" leads me to think that you have forgotten the biology you learned in High School. You are profoundly mistaken if you believe that we can cherry-pick arbitrary parts of ecosystems and micromanage them successfully.
"we need to make overcoming the Earth's gravity considerably cheaper" is an understatement. This is related to "Planets and such will be useful for their raw materials, which can be extracted in an automated way." The cost barrier for transporting such resources from potentially distant planetary sources to the station will be prohibitive for some time to come. It may be that it will always be prohibitive in practical terms, or expensive enough to drastically limit scalability.
I did not envision wholesale abandonment of earth either. And here is a deep political and social problem. Who goes, while the rest pay the heavy cost of building the colony?
I could go on, but haven't the time or inclination. I would suggest you get out pencil and paper and do detailed cost estimates. Take into account waste, inefficiency, failure, corruption, etc. Think of the amount of water that would need to be available initially and on an ongoing basis, and the cost to transport it. Do not pretend you can recycle more than a small fraction of it. Do not pretend that you can successfully farm in space and feed large numbers of people without having gradually scaled up pilot projects over a period of 50 to 100 years. Look up the results for the labs that were supposed to preserve agriculturally useful plant seeds during the cold war. You will be shocked and disillusioned at the difficulty, and will have to take it into account.
Research the cost of mining the earth's surface with Third World slaves (which is essentially what their mining personnel are), transport via ancient, fully amortized railroads, and the details of mining enterprises. Use space shuttle costs to transport all that to, say, Mars, with the added costs of human life support. Do it all with robotics? That is easily 50 years away.
By the way, the only intelligent investment in space exploration we can make for the next 50 years or more is in unmanned exploration. It will take 100 more years of robotics before any of your dreams can even be realistically considered.
Anyone can bluster, spit out corny emotional arguments, and gloss over cost, feasibility, and analysis.
"Go to the stars" and "colonize space" are empty phrases. We are colonizing space. We already live next to a star. What's that, you say? Travel to a different star, chosen arbitrarily from light years away? Go to a planet or asteroid that has no means of support? Damn the cost? What if Columbus blah blah blah?
Colonizing space means abandoning a perfectly servicable planet to pursue a simple-minded superstitious belief: that it is physically feasible and statistically likely to find one or more places that are better than earth, and transport significant numbers of people at an affordable cost. At the moment, it cannot be done. I know, I know, this is where pedestrian analyses of Columbus kick in.
Terraforming? Another superstition. People who believe in terraforming are implicitly claiming that even though we cannot maintain sustainable conditions on a planet with plenty of water, oxygen, plant and animal species, and free energy from the sun, we can build a similar environment elsewhere that would require interplanetary transport of enormous quantities of water, nitrogen, soil, plant and animal species, building tools and materials etc.
You can send them to school, but you can't make them pay attention.
She greets each resident in the home by name, announces visitors, phone calls, voice mails, emails and deliveries. Cleopatra shows who is home, pictures of recent visitors at the front door, the local weather forecast, stock market changes, and even the national security level.
Good Lord, does anyone care about any of these services, except perhaps photos of recent visitors?
What would be useful for such a system to do, worth the bother and expense of setting it up?
Until it has speech recognition and allows you to get it to dial your phone for you and coordinates and performs useful household tasks, it's just another pointless gee-whiz toy.
I would have RTFA, but it is slashdotted at the moment.
What pundit so consistently manages to make slashdotters roll their eyes and write their litany of snide remarks? Even Jon Katz wasn't this productive. Dvorak never fails. Like a loudmouthed old man at a hardware store, he will let you know what he thinks about any and everything.
After he's dead, there will be a thick compendium of his writings, and the pundit industry will hail him as a brilliant prognosticator, acerbic writer, and deep thinker. Luddites and the tecnologically incompetent throughout the english-speaking world will snap it up, read it, and buy it as gifts for their peers.
Not exactly. Here is something they posted on a DAZ Studio forum:
"Thankfully, we were able to get Trolltech to discount their SDK fee
considerably since the package that we're offering is limited for use
specifically with DAZ|Studio. We do not offer the complete QT package, if
you're interested in that so that you can use it to develop items for other
apps, then you'll need to contact Trolltech directly. It's been a very
useful tool for our development team and we wouldn't have this cool
cross-platform application if it wasn't for their tools.
"Through this special pricing, DAZ is able to distribute copies of the
DAZ|Studio SDK for a one time fee of $995. This does not include any general
QT support from Trolltech, as far as we're aware. It does include some DAZ
support, and we'll be heading that up through a special forum private to
registered developers. The current "Developer Discussion" forum is for
everything pertaining to the free DAZ|Script dev kit only and will remain
open to the public.
"DAZ is also going to be offering a further discount as an incentive to
publish plugins through the DAZ3D website. If you choose to release your
plugins/add-ons exclusively through the DAZ3D website (you may also sell
through your own personally owned site, if you have one), then DAZ will
subsidize the full amount of the Trolltech license fee. Unfortunately, we
must require the $995 up front from everyone in order to make sure that
Trolltech's fee is covered by each copy we distribute. The way that DAZ will
subsidize the cost is that the first $995 dollars of commissions that DAZ
collects as our portion of your products revenues will be given back to you.
In other words, in a standard 50/50 royalty split with DAZ, once your
product nets $1990, then the cost of the license fee will be given back to
you.
"As part of this exclusivity contract that you will need to agree to, there
will be an early termination clause. If you agree to these terms, but then
pull your product(s) from the DAZ site before one year has transpired from
the purchase date of your license from DAZ, then DAZ will need to reclaim
the $995 from you. Unfortunately, if you only wish to release freebies,
Trolltech still requires us to collect their license fee 100%.:(
"Hopefully, through this subsidization program, as many of you as possible
will be able to obtain the full DAZ|Studio SDK so that you may release
whatever products you wish.
"Here is more technical information regarding the SDK and what is included:
"All the sample plugins that that come with the DAZ|Studio SDK include
project files for compiling in Microsoft Visual C++ 7 (.NET). Microsoft
Visual C++ 6 can also be used to compile plugins for DAZ|Studio. However, no
project files are included in the SDK for VC++ 6 or earlier, or any other
IDE (due to the large number of them in use by the developer community at
large). Other Development Environments may also work for compiling
DAZ|Studio plugins, however, other IDEs are not officially supported by DAZ
for the Win32 environment, so you will likely need to adjust the way your
particular compiler finds/names symbols in order to link against the
DAZ|Studio libraries. Some people have had success using Microsoft Visual
C++ 2005 Express Edition, which is freely available from Microsoft.
"On the Mac, the IDE that we use is XCode, using the GCC 3.3 compiler. XCode
is freely available from Apple.
"So, we hope that the free DAZ|Script dev kit will be robust enough for those
you who do not have the budget for the full SDK license, and that through
our "subsidy", that those of you who are interested in becoming serious
plugin developers will be able to do so with little financial impact as
well.
"Thanks for your support, we can't wait to see what sorts of tools and
features you all begin to add to DAZ|Studio as third-party developers.
Together, we can all help make DAZ|Studio into the program of our dreams.:)
"Enjoy the new version, and have a great weekend."
It appears that if I put MP3 player hardware in random everyday objects, there are plenty of people who would buy them.
Shoes, cell phones, PDAs are taken, how about underwear? Lingerie? Things that are commonly inserted into body cavities? Keychains? Sunglasses? Scarves? Things people put in their hair to hold it in place or as decoration? Sweatbands? Bracelets or anklets?
Hell, put them in fruits and vegetables, bags of junk food, suppositories of various kinds, nicotine patches, beverage containers...
Still, this insistence on listening to music at evry conceivable spare moment seems goofy and alienating. I hope it's a fad...
Come on all you First-World armchair reformers! Here's your chance to reiterate your pious political beliefs about freedom and democracy!
Once again, you can gratouitously shit on China because it is a repressive authoritarian regime, and say stupid things like "no information is better than censored information," or "foreign companies have a duty to flout the law in authoritarian countries," or any of the other drivel so often posted under this topic.
Things are not as they appear at first glance; if you live in a glass house, don't cast stones.
Let's assume every man, woman, and child on earth consumes the equivalent of 10 pirated DVDs per year. Let's further assume that there are currently about 10 billion people on earth, and that each DVD's list price is US$20. Then, the lost sales are really:
10 x 10,000,000,000 x US$20 = US$2,000,000,000,000 = 2 Trillion US Dollars
This clearly dwarfs the cost of invading Iraq and giving Baby Boomers their Social Security benefits put together, therefore it is much more important. It is in fact, as shown by the objective calculations above, by far the most important issue on earth today. More than global warming, AIDS, tuberculosis, environmental pollution, shortages of potable water, collapse of fisheries, ozone layer depletion, overpopulation, lack of medical care, famine, poverty, slavery, wars in the Third World, tyrannical dictatorships, nuclear weapons proliferation, exploitation of the many by the few, rampant governmental corruption, compromised information and news media, organized crime, in short more important than anything.
A key role of Free and Open Source Software is to maintain a parallel world where we don't have to be the captive audience of greedy and inefficient industrialists. If the FOSS notion could be extended to a wide variety of physical devices, appliances, vehicles, and other everyday items, we could protect ourselves and our future even better.
Generic "robotic" hardware, computer-controlled devices that do useful work for their owners, seems to be a required next step to convert centralized mass production into distributed mass production. Still the stuff of sci fi, though.
Cupertino, CA - 2006-04-01 Apple Computer Corporation announced today what is possibly the single greatest technological advance of the past 500 years. Steve Jobs, accompanied by various lesser industry luminaries were invited to make this solemn announcement before the United Nations Security Council, which was convened in a special emergency session. News networks around the world suspended all other news coverage in order to report and comment live from New York as events unfolded. In the United States, all civil aviation was ordered to remain grounded starting 6 hours prior to the announcement, and remained so until three hours after.
Industry and commerce ground to a halt throughout the world, as workers, peasants, and billionaire executives alike tuned in to monitor the proceedings on radio, television, internet, and a variety of wireless and satellite communications. Most retail businesses in the United States and Europe were closed for the day, in preparation for the announcement, which was expected to change human civilization as it is currently conceived or understood.
Clergy from Mecca, to Rome, to Salt Lake City, to Tokyo and beyond paced rooms as they waited and brooded over the vast consequences of the announcement. In many Third World nations, the poor and ignorant masses were so overcome with fear and anxiety, that rioting and mass suicides began to spread on all continents, barely held in check by legions of police and military personnel, tenuously in control of their own emotions.
The entire planet fell dumb with awe as Jobs made his momentous announcement: Apple Computer had devised a method to capture and process data that was for practical purposes impervious to the causes of erasure and data loss that plague modern computing devices. No amount of electromagnetic fields could cause erasure, and data written with this technology was expected to be readable for a thousand years or more under reasonable storage conditions. Even more mind-boggling, the reading and writing of the data was technology independent. It would not be necessary for users hundreds of years in the future to preserve today's technology. Jobs demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt, the ease with which future generations would be able to access such data.
The new technology, revolutionary yet environmentally friendly nanotechnology-based laminae of compacted cellulose fiber as the data substrate, and finely machined graphite rods or thin tubes of optically dense viscous gel deposition units, were shown in a variety of decorative colors. Jobs demonstrated a bright yellow substrate which was preformatted with fine rulings on its surface to guide the application of data. He showed data deposition in blue, black, red, and green, and claimed that Apple could provide deposition units in any arbitrary color. The substrate was to be made available in pads of 100 laminae, and the deposition units in boxes of one dozen. Later in the day Staples and Office Depot made surprise announcements of the imminent availability of this technology in their stores worldwide.
Yet another interesting aspect of the Iraq invasion is that it expresses a commonly held superstition that overwhelming military force practically guarantees a desired political outcome. It was believed in Vietnam, the Iran-Iraq war, and now in the current invasion of Iraq, to name only a few instances. In none of these was it true.
Your claim that "people and countries only respect power," while true under many circumstances, is a dangerous cliche that doesn't scale well at all. It is a lot like, and usually goes hand in hand with, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," a dumb oversimplification that is more often false than true. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend, it is merely the enemy of your enemy. Overwhelming military force only guarantees destruction, death, and prolonged misery. On rare occasions does a desired political outcome occur at tolerable cost.
Both Saddam Hussein and OBL were enemies of our enemies, and foolish aphorism-driven politicians felt inspired to implement these simple-minded old saws during the '70s and '80s. Now look where we are.
Don't believe in such oversimplified little mottos, they are traps.
Worse than that, whenever I try to "discuss" this sort of thing with conservative coworkers, their response consists mainly of the following components:
Deny instead of refute.
Reply with some variant of "What about { Clinton | the Democrats | Liberals | America haters | etc}, you think they wouldn't have { done the same thing | done nothing at all | fucked it up even worse }?"
Some vague but unsubstantiated claim that we are indeed fighting terrorists or at least defending our nation and people from grave danger.
An often explicitly recognized preference to argue about the political rehetoric rather than boring old facts.
Some of you have mentioned the possibility, even imminence, of an invasion of Iran by US forces. This will not happen any time soon.
They do not yet have significant WMD. There are several iffy, expensive, and time-consuming steps between initiation of uranium processing and deployment of nuclear weapons.
They are Shiites and the core of the Iraqi government is Shiite. Invade Iran and more than half of Iraq will for practical purposes meld with Iran against us. This in addition to the stubborn Sunni resistance.
US forces are barely able to deal with Iraq. Iran would more than double the load.
We have already given credence to much of al Qaeda's propaganda. Invading Iran would be the single most powerful al Qaeda recruitment propaganda coup to date. They'll be lining up from Indonesia to London, maybe even in Detroit.
The price of hydrocarbon fuels and feedstocks would skyrocket well beyond anyone's tolerance threshold. While this would send oil companies into profit orgasms never before dreamed of, it would not be sustainable for more than a few weeks, and the economic damage would be spectacular.
The current US government has dwindling support as it is for military adventure. There would be very little durable, reliable political support for an Iran invasion.
There are undoubtedly more reasons, but I'll leave them to the rest of you.
I worship all celebrities. I especially admire people who by virtue of their selfishness, narcissism, unlimited greed, ruthlessness, and abrasive personalities are able to control vast numbers of people and make themselves fabulously wealthy, while skimping as much as possible on their employees' compensation. My loins tremble when their product or service is either more or less worthless, or if they are able to con the public into buying yearly version upgrades at near full price when only cosmetic changes or bug fixes were made to the product.
Naturally, I'm also a sucker for shallow, extroverted female celebrities who are very sexy and are willing to show off their physical assets.
Yay! Time to think of the stupidest things you can, and have some government agency do them! Let's beam porn from the moon! Let's make a big wind tunnel and throw french fries into it! Let's send a spacecraft to mars with 2500 people, and damn the cost!
Nuclear weapons have negligible battlefield value. Their use would spark a similar response from the opponent or from international alliances, formal or informal. In either case, the use of nuclear weapons would have dire consequences for their users, at very least preventing them from achieving whatever military or political goals they were pursuing.
If North Korea were to use one against South Korea or our troops there, we would doubtless have international support for effectively ending the postwar Nort Korean regime by force. The North Koreans probably consider this an undesirable outcome. Likewise, if Iran were to use them against Israel, the old regime would be quickly removed with broadbased international support. Go down the list and you will see that the consequences of their use are so bad, that it is pointless to use them. Even battlefield nukes would galvanize international support for emasculating the aggressor. If they are of so little military value, and they are so expensive, why have them?
This, of course, aside from the situation in the nuked target. Radiological contamination, mass hysteria, a potentially large number of casualties. It would be off limits to both the attacker and the victim. Imagine our own military trying to control Iraq if we had vaporized part or all of a major Iraqi city. Would we still have allies there? Would the "Coalition of the Willing" still exist? Would more terrorists rush in to fight us? Would our soldiers have to wear NBC gear in 100 degree heat? Would we face an entire planet pushing for sanctions against us?
Please don't repond with something like "Oh yeah? Well fuck them! We can do without them!", or "We have the military resources to overcome all of those things." Those would be 1) dumb, and 2) unfounded answers.
With regards to your belief that the high tech weapons are "basically junk when a real army attacks you with MLRS's, howitzers , tanks, gunships and fighter bombers," you failed to read my post correctly. Modern day conventional weapons, especially those we are using now, are high tech weapons, and they have permitted us to destroy older technologies quickly and on a large scale. Old-fashioned artillery is worthless if you can fly in and destroy it without your aircraft being shot down, as we do today. You are just plain wrong. Adding significant compute power to both ordnance and military vehicles, developing high quality remote sensing for military forces of all kinds, and using things like microwaves and even high-powered laser beams (although these can cause significant collateral damage) are far more cost-effective projects than nuclear weapons, and that is the core of my point.
Somewhere in this story there is an interesting subtext. With new weapons such as LRADS, microwave antipersonnel rifles/cannons, pilotless drones and armored vehicles, and a wide variety of other emerging military technologies, why would anyone want to build nuclear weapons?
I can understand that they are trying to play the deterrent game by trying to set up a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) scenario, but there are three problems there. First, it is difficult to set up if your opponent can build the weapons more quickly, in larger numbers, or with significant performance advantages. Secondly, it is immensely expensive. Many billions of dollars need to be spent over many years, and only a trickle of weapons, if any, will come out in the medium term. If you come up against significant international resistance, the costs can become impossible to pay. Thirdly, and here's the clincher, it is not clear that MAD will deter nuclear war among today's nuclear opponents. Would India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Israel, and the dozen or two other nuclear powers or soon to be powers shoot first? How quickly would they resort to them if they were on the losing side of a serious conventional conflict?
It would seem that MAD isn't what it used to be, and most or all of the smaller nations that are investing enormous amounts of money on the marriage of missiles and nuclear weapons would be better off leaving such 20th century technologies behind and investing heavily on the newer generations of high tech weaponry. More bang for the buck, and probably more practical boots-on-the-ground security for their countries.
This is the sort of moderating the rules are supposed to prevent. I stated the obvious, but it is apparently a minority opinion. Slashdot sci fi freaks evidently find it too unpalatable.
The ISS is scientifically worthless and squanders huge amounts of resources far better spent on unmanned missions. It is nothing but an excuse to funnel vast amounts of federal money to aerospace and defense companies for little return.
Manned space exploration inhibits space science and space exploration by wasting the lion's share of space funding on this glorified elitist amusement park ride and hypertrophied high school science fair project. The shuttle is equally worthless and should also be abandoned.
Slashdot Mirror
The most glaring problems:
- There is no a priori reason to believe that "many of the irrational issues we have here that are causing sustainability problems could be avoided up there." Quite the contrary. The same reasons will be dragged up there.
- There is no wind or water flow to dissipate pollutants, so the claim that "pollution that is causing problems on Earth will be a non-issue since the sheer volume of space available out there will make dumping easy" is, to put it mildly, unfounded. It constitutes the dumping of enormous amounts of mass that would persist in the vicinity of the colony.
- The remark "I don't think you'd want any animals out there, except as a luxury" leads me to think that you have forgotten the biology you learned in High School. You are profoundly mistaken if you believe that we can cherry-pick arbitrary parts of ecosystems and micromanage them successfully.
- "we need to make overcoming the Earth's gravity considerably cheaper" is an understatement. This is related to "Planets and such will be useful for their raw materials, which can be extracted in an automated way." The cost barrier for transporting such resources from potentially distant planetary sources to the station will be prohibitive for some time to come. It may be that it will always be prohibitive in practical terms, or expensive enough to drastically limit scalability.
- I did not envision wholesale abandonment of earth either. And here is a deep political and social problem. Who goes, while the rest pay the heavy cost of building the colony?
I could go on, but haven't the time or inclination. I would suggest you get out pencil and paper and do detailed cost estimates. Take into account waste, inefficiency, failure, corruption, etc. Think of the amount of water that would need to be available initially and on an ongoing basis, and the cost to transport it. Do not pretend you can recycle more than a small fraction of it. Do not pretend that you can successfully farm in space and feed large numbers of people without having gradually scaled up pilot projects over a period of 50 to 100 years. Look up the results for the labs that were supposed to preserve agriculturally useful plant seeds during the cold war. You will be shocked and disillusioned at the difficulty, and will have to take it into account.Research the cost of mining the earth's surface with Third World slaves (which is essentially what their mining personnel are), transport via ancient, fully amortized railroads, and the details of mining enterprises. Use space shuttle costs to transport all that to, say, Mars, with the added costs of human life support. Do it all with robotics? That is easily 50 years away.
By the way, the only intelligent investment in space exploration we can make for the next 50 years or more is in unmanned exploration. It will take 100 more years of robotics before any of your dreams can even be realistically considered.
Sorry!
Anyone can bluster, spit out corny emotional arguments, and gloss over cost, feasibility, and analysis.
"Go to the stars" and "colonize space" are empty phrases. We are colonizing space. We already live next to a star. What's that, you say? Travel to a different star, chosen arbitrarily from light years away? Go to a planet or asteroid that has no means of support? Damn the cost? What if Columbus blah blah blah?
Colonizing space means abandoning a perfectly servicable planet to pursue a simple-minded superstitious belief: that it is physically feasible and statistically likely to find one or more places that are better than earth, and transport significant numbers of people at an affordable cost. At the moment, it cannot be done. I know, I know, this is where pedestrian analyses of Columbus kick in.
Terraforming? Another superstition. People who believe in terraforming are implicitly claiming that even though we cannot maintain sustainable conditions on a planet with plenty of water, oxygen, plant and animal species, and free energy from the sun, we can build a similar environment elsewhere that would require interplanetary transport of enormous quantities of water, nitrogen, soil, plant and animal species, building tools and materials etc.
You can send them to school, but you can't make them pay attention.
Albert Einstein: "God does not gamble"
Stephen Hawking: "Humans must colonize space or be wiped out"
May the ignorant hordes interpret them as they wish.
Uh, hold on a sec...
Good Lord, does anyone care about any of these services, except perhaps photos of recent visitors?
What would be useful for such a system to do, worth the bother and expense of setting it up? Until it has speech recognition and allows you to get it to dial your phone for you and coordinates and performs useful household tasks, it's just another pointless gee-whiz toy.
I would have RTFA, but it is slashdotted at the moment.
After he's dead, there will be a thick compendium of his writings, and the pundit industry will hail him as a brilliant prognosticator, acerbic writer, and deep thinker. Luddites and the tecnologically incompetent throughout the english-speaking world will snap it up, read it, and buy it as gifts for their peers.
Send them to Iraq. That should help them work through their repressed feelings. And pronto, no doubt.
"Thankfully, we were able to get Trolltech to discount their SDK fee considerably since the package that we're offering is limited for use specifically with DAZ|Studio. We do not offer the complete QT package, if you're interested in that so that you can use it to develop items for other apps, then you'll need to contact Trolltech directly. It's been a very useful tool for our development team and we wouldn't have this cool cross-platform application if it wasn't for their tools.
"Through this special pricing, DAZ is able to distribute copies of the DAZ|Studio SDK for a one time fee of $995. This does not include any general QT support from Trolltech, as far as we're aware. It does include some DAZ support, and we'll be heading that up through a special forum private to registered developers. The current "Developer Discussion" forum is for everything pertaining to the free DAZ|Script dev kit only and will remain open to the public.
"DAZ is also going to be offering a further discount as an incentive to publish plugins through the DAZ3D website. If you choose to release your plugins/add-ons exclusively through the DAZ3D website (you may also sell through your own personally owned site, if you have one), then DAZ will subsidize the full amount of the Trolltech license fee. Unfortunately, we must require the $995 up front from everyone in order to make sure that Trolltech's fee is covered by each copy we distribute. The way that DAZ will subsidize the cost is that the first $995 dollars of commissions that DAZ collects as our portion of your products revenues will be given back to you. In other words, in a standard 50/50 royalty split with DAZ, once your product nets $1990, then the cost of the license fee will be given back to you.
"As part of this exclusivity contract that you will need to agree to, there will be an early termination clause. If you agree to these terms, but then pull your product(s) from the DAZ site before one year has transpired from the purchase date of your license from DAZ, then DAZ will need to reclaim the $995 from you. Unfortunately, if you only wish to release freebies, Trolltech still requires us to collect their license fee 100%. :(
"Hopefully, through this subsidization program, as many of you as possible will be able to obtain the full DAZ|Studio SDK so that you may release whatever products you wish.
"Here is more technical information regarding the SDK and what is included:
"All the sample plugins that that come with the DAZ|Studio SDK include project files for compiling in Microsoft Visual C++ 7 (.NET). Microsoft Visual C++ 6 can also be used to compile plugins for DAZ|Studio. However, no project files are included in the SDK for VC++ 6 or earlier, or any other IDE (due to the large number of them in use by the developer community at large). Other Development Environments may also work for compiling DAZ|Studio plugins, however, other IDEs are not officially supported by DAZ for the Win32 environment, so you will likely need to adjust the way your particular compiler finds/names symbols in order to link against the DAZ|Studio libraries. Some people have had success using Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition, which is freely available from Microsoft.
"On the Mac, the IDE that we use is XCode, using the GCC 3.3 compiler. XCode is freely available from Apple.
"So, we hope that the free DAZ|Script dev kit will be robust enough for those you who do not have the budget for the full SDK license, and that through our "subsidy", that those of you who are interested in becoming serious plugin developers will be able to do so with little financial impact as well.
"Thanks for your support, we can't wait to see what sorts of tools and features you all begin to add to DAZ|Studio as third-party developers. Together, we can all help make DAZ|Studio into the program of our dreams. :)
"Enjoy the new version, and have a great weekend."
DAZ Studio is one of many examples of commercial software that use Qt. It is also free as in free beer.
Search for Zolpidem at In Silico Sstudios
Shoes, cell phones, PDAs are taken, how about underwear? Lingerie? Things that are commonly inserted into body cavities? Keychains? Sunglasses? Scarves? Things people put in their hair to hold it in place or as decoration? Sweatbands? Bracelets or anklets?
Hell, put them in fruits and vegetables, bags of junk food, suppositories of various kinds, nicotine patches, beverage containers...
Still, this insistence on listening to music at evry conceivable spare moment seems goofy and alienating. I hope it's a fad...
Once again, you can gratouitously shit on China because it is a repressive authoritarian regime, and say stupid things like "no information is better than censored information," or "foreign companies have a duty to flout the law in authoritarian countries," or any of the other drivel so often posted under this topic.
Things are not as they appear at first glance; if you live in a glass house, don't cast stones.
10 x 10,000,000,000 x US$20 = US$2,000,000,000,000 = 2 Trillion US Dollars
This clearly dwarfs the cost of invading Iraq and giving Baby Boomers their Social Security benefits put together, therefore it is much more important. It is in fact, as shown by the objective calculations above, by far the most important issue on earth today. More than global warming, AIDS, tuberculosis, environmental pollution, shortages of potable water, collapse of fisheries, ozone layer depletion, overpopulation, lack of medical care, famine, poverty, slavery, wars in the Third World, tyrannical dictatorships, nuclear weapons proliferation, exploitation of the many by the few, rampant governmental corruption, compromised information and news media, organized crime, in short more important than anything.
Someone should tell the RIAA.
Generic "robotic" hardware, computer-controlled devices that do useful work for their owners, seems to be a required next step to convert centralized mass production into distributed mass production. Still the stuff of sci fi, though.
Industry and commerce ground to a halt throughout the world, as workers, peasants, and billionaire executives alike tuned in to monitor the proceedings on radio, television, internet, and a variety of wireless and satellite communications. Most retail businesses in the United States and Europe were closed for the day, in preparation for the announcement, which was expected to change human civilization as it is currently conceived or understood.
Clergy from Mecca, to Rome, to Salt Lake City, to Tokyo and beyond paced rooms as they waited and brooded over the vast consequences of the announcement. In many Third World nations, the poor and ignorant masses were so overcome with fear and anxiety, that rioting and mass suicides began to spread on all continents, barely held in check by legions of police and military personnel, tenuously in control of their own emotions.
The entire planet fell dumb with awe as Jobs made his momentous announcement: Apple Computer had devised a method to capture and process data that was for practical purposes impervious to the causes of erasure and data loss that plague modern computing devices. No amount of electromagnetic fields could cause erasure, and data written with this technology was expected to be readable for a thousand years or more under reasonable storage conditions. Even more mind-boggling, the reading and writing of the data was technology independent. It would not be necessary for users hundreds of years in the future to preserve today's technology. Jobs demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt, the ease with which future generations would be able to access such data.
The new technology, revolutionary yet environmentally friendly nanotechnology-based laminae of compacted cellulose fiber as the data substrate, and finely machined graphite rods or thin tubes of optically dense viscous gel deposition units, were shown in a variety of decorative colors. Jobs demonstrated a bright yellow substrate which was preformatted with fine rulings on its surface to guide the application of data. He showed data deposition in blue, black, red, and green, and claimed that Apple could provide deposition units in any arbitrary color. The substrate was to be made available in pads of 100 laminae, and the deposition units in boxes of one dozen. Later in the day Staples and Office Depot made surprise announcements of the imminent availability of this technology in their stores worldwide.
Your claim that "people and countries only respect power," while true under many circumstances, is a dangerous cliche that doesn't scale well at all. It is a lot like, and usually goes hand in hand with, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," a dumb oversimplification that is more often false than true. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend, it is merely the enemy of your enemy. Overwhelming military force only guarantees destruction, death, and prolonged misery. On rare occasions does a desired political outcome occur at tolerable cost.
Both Saddam Hussein and OBL were enemies of our enemies, and foolish aphorism-driven politicians felt inspired to implement these simple-minded old saws during the '70s and '80s. Now look where we are.Don't believe in such oversimplified little mottos, they are traps.
- They do not yet have significant WMD. There are several iffy, expensive, and time-consuming steps between initiation of uranium processing and deployment of nuclear weapons.
- They are Shiites and the core of the Iraqi government is Shiite. Invade Iran and more than half of Iraq will for practical purposes meld with Iran against us. This in addition to the stubborn Sunni resistance.
- US forces are barely able to deal with Iraq. Iran would more than double the load.
- We have already given credence to much of al Qaeda's propaganda. Invading Iran would be the single most powerful al Qaeda recruitment propaganda coup to date. They'll be lining up from Indonesia to London, maybe even in Detroit.
- The price of hydrocarbon fuels and feedstocks would skyrocket well beyond anyone's tolerance threshold. While this would send oil companies into profit orgasms never before dreamed of, it would not be sustainable for more than a few weeks, and the economic damage would be spectacular.
- The current US government has dwindling support as it is for military adventure. There would be very little durable, reliable political support for an Iran invasion.
There are undoubtedly more reasons, but I'll leave them to the rest of you.Naturally, I'm also a sucker for shallow, extroverted female celebrities who are very sexy and are willing to show off their physical assets.
If North Korea were to use one against South Korea or our troops there, we would doubtless have international support for effectively ending the postwar Nort Korean regime by force. The North Koreans probably consider this an undesirable outcome. Likewise, if Iran were to use them against Israel, the old regime would be quickly removed with broadbased international support. Go down the list and you will see that the consequences of their use are so bad, that it is pointless to use them. Even battlefield nukes would galvanize international support for emasculating the aggressor. If they are of so little military value, and they are so expensive, why have them?
This, of course, aside from the situation in the nuked target. Radiological contamination, mass hysteria, a potentially large number of casualties. It would be off limits to both the attacker and the victim. Imagine our own military trying to control Iraq if we had vaporized part or all of a major Iraqi city. Would we still have allies there? Would the "Coalition of the Willing" still exist? Would more terrorists rush in to fight us? Would our soldiers have to wear NBC gear in 100 degree heat? Would we face an entire planet pushing for sanctions against us?
Please don't repond with something like "Oh yeah? Well fuck them! We can do without them!", or "We have the military resources to overcome all of those things." Those would be 1) dumb, and 2) unfounded answers.
With regards to your belief that the high tech weapons are "basically junk when a real army attacks you with MLRS's, howitzers , tanks, gunships and fighter bombers," you failed to read my post correctly. Modern day conventional weapons, especially those we are using now, are high tech weapons, and they have permitted us to destroy older technologies quickly and on a large scale. Old-fashioned artillery is worthless if you can fly in and destroy it without your aircraft being shot down, as we do today. You are just plain wrong. Adding significant compute power to both ordnance and military vehicles, developing high quality remote sensing for military forces of all kinds, and using things like microwaves and even high-powered laser beams (although these can cause significant collateral damage) are far more cost-effective projects than nuclear weapons, and that is the core of my point.
I can understand that they are trying to play the deterrent game by trying to set up a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) scenario, but there are three problems there. First, it is difficult to set up if your opponent can build the weapons more quickly, in larger numbers, or with significant performance advantages. Secondly, it is immensely expensive. Many billions of dollars need to be spent over many years, and only a trickle of weapons, if any, will come out in the medium term. If you come up against significant international resistance, the costs can become impossible to pay. Thirdly, and here's the clincher, it is not clear that MAD will deter nuclear war among today's nuclear opponents. Would India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Israel, and the dozen or two other nuclear powers or soon to be powers shoot first? How quickly would they resort to them if they were on the losing side of a serious conventional conflict?
It would seem that MAD isn't what it used to be, and most or all of the smaller nations that are investing enormous amounts of money on the marriage of missiles and nuclear weapons would be better off leaving such 20th century technologies behind and investing heavily on the newer generations of high tech weaponry. More bang for the buck, and probably more practical boots-on-the-ground security for their countries.
I second the motion!
Manned space exploration inhibits space science and space exploration by wasting the lion's share of space funding on this glorified elitist amusement park ride and hypertrophied high school science fair project. The shuttle is equally worthless and should also be abandoned.