None of what you just said refutes my post in the least.
I outlined the ideal schenario...a very possible future that would benefit all of us vastly
Of course you'll need connections between the lily pads, and of course that's not free. But if you have enough computing power and enough harddisk capacity there is potential for mirroring and other techniques that would still allow us to 'keep our internet' without having to pay an arm and a leg to regional telecom monopolies. 0.0001% of our income tax could finance the hi-band repeaters between islands.
The parent article was asking if wireless is overhyped...I was trying to show that it's underhyped, which I truly believe it is.
Wireless could allow consumers to free themselves from the regional telecom monopolies' grasp and transform internet access from a monthly pay-service into a single expense commodity market. That's a tremendous gain for consumers as commodity markets are much more competitive and offer far better flexibility of choice. It will be a wonderful day when wireless allows us to abandon the Bells and the Alltels that are blocking the development of better telecom and broadband.
Which world would you rather live in?
A) Paying $45 a month for 1.5mbps down / 128 mbps up
B) Paying $90 every two years(wireless hub upgrade) for 10mbps down / 10mpbs up
I can't think of a better advancement in communications than having legions of consumer owned WAPs create a freely useable broadband mesh.
Do you ever look back at your older episodes and wonder if a particular myth was busted mistakenly? For instance, a few weeks ago here at Slashdot we discussed the 'Archimedes Death Ray' myth. There were several of us including myself who thought the myth was plausible given a sighting method for the shields. One reader even quoted an RAF airman procedure for aiming a signal mirror at a passing plane. That seemed very much like the missing piece of the Death Ray puzzle.
Do your producers give you the flexibility to revisit previous myths like these?
We really don't have time or funds to go through a developer recruiting cycle, create a practice, get the team "gelled" etc. What we'd really like to do is find a small pre-existing team which which we could form a relationship to get our product out the door and possibly continue working with.
If you've got a problem and no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire . . . The Dev Team
A guy who writes FIVE seperate languages just for a book is a hardcore geek. I mean he invented Elvish (including Quenya and Sindarin), Dwarvish (Khuzdul), Entish, and Black Speech. He might not have been a technology geek but he was definitly a geek.
Yep, a linguist geek. From his biography:
Even as a young boy, Tolkien loved languages. He invented his own, but his mother viewed them as a waste of his time. "As a child, I was always inventing languages. But that was naughty," Tolkien recalled wryly. "Poor boys must concentrate on getting scholarships. When I was supposed to be studying Latin and Greek, I studied Welsh and English. When I was supposed to be concentrating on English, I took up Finnish."
Through the door of language Tolkien entered the world of myth. "The seed [of the myth] is linguistic, of course. I'm a linguist and everything is linguistic--that's why I take such pains with names." A language, he believed, could not remain abstract. It must arise within a history and a culture--or, if lacking that, a mythology. Soon he would create for his own languages a most elaborate world indeed.
How many authors write stories like that? It's almost as if the story was an afterthought created by the linguistics. I.e. the linguistics were so rich that a story grew around them.
Most authors write like this: Story(as a rough outline) -> Characters(including setting) -> Details(such as language, customs, etc.)
as opposed to Tolkien who did the opposite:
Tolkien: Language -> Culture -> Characters -> Story
Robert E. Howard is the only other fantasy author I can think of who wrote like that, except Howard built his stories (Conan) over a predetermined geography rather than a predermined language. Interestingly, both J.R.R. Tolkein and Robert E. Howard wrote fantasy in the 1930s, and are considered pillars of the genre.
Personally I don't give much for the Alien films, but it's a matter of taste.
The reason I think it's there is because 'space movies' are mostly about life in space.
The original Alien film exposed a lot of possibilities, and left a lot of questions unanswered. The biology of the Alien creature was so bizarre and unfamiliar...it seemed as if maybe the laws of chemistry and physics were being broken, but then again...maybe they weren't. This was something that noone had seen before, or imagined...and instead of being another movie with a 'guy in a rubber suit' the director managed to create something horrifyingly believable. Bottom line: The film does an excellent job of consistently maintaining its plausibility, which is very hard to do in science fiction.
Some people liken Alien to a 'haunted house movie' in space, but the film also succeeds in creating a deep sense of uncertainty and lack of knowledge about space. It asks the question, what do we really know about what's out there? Most other 'space films' mess that part up, and 'earth-apomorphize' space. Alien however, is truly alien.
The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation
This is like giving an enemy instructions on how to attack you, not very bright.
If there's any group of people on the planet who want the internet disolved it's politicians and people in power. The internet is a tool for democratization, it gives 'the people' a voice. Hollywood, the music industry, the broadcast industry, the political 'industry' all wish the internet was never invented...keep telling them stuff like that and they may finally uninvent it.
Lawyers are destroying this country, heck they practically own it. 90% of congress are lawyers, 9/10 medical suits are frivolous and the 'industry' of medical law is about playing the averages. In my home state of Georgia(USA) medical practioners have their own insurance union, they lose 1 Billion dollars a year defending against frivolous lawsuits. Only 1 in 10 of those suits actually stick...it's practically extortion.
Likewise, recent changes to IP are one of the worst things to happen to science and industry. Used correctly IP has its place in prompting innovation, but lawyers are turning IP into something strictly to leverage lawsuits with. That doesn't benefit customers, scientific organizations or industry leaders...but it does syphon mountains of cash to the IP lawyers.
Revenge of the Sith comes out on DVD today, and there's an interesting article on Slate dissecting the now-complete trilogy
All I can say is that I'm very grateful to have episodes IV, V, and VI in their original untouched format. IMO they are the only films deserving to be called the 'Star Wars Trilogy'.
Well, if somebody actually made a TV series like that, I would be drawn to it. Unfortunately, that has yet to happen. The average person, irrespective of gender, isn't very interested in maths or science, and until that changes we are not going to be seeing any hard SF on TV. It's the diluted product, or nothing.
I think it's delusional to say math and science interest isn't dominated by the male gender. At least 3/4 of every math/science major is male.
As far as the dilution from hard sci-fi...I think the sci-fi channel's attempt to draw the female audience into its viewership has dramatically diluted the science content of their programming. IMO it was a very unfortunate way to draw female viewers...because it excluded and pushed away male viewers like myself who value hard(i.e. based on actual science) science fiction. I used to watch sci-fi, I don't anymore.
People have an impression of sci-fi fans being small men who sit in the dark watching Star Trek but it's not like that now... There has been an increase in positive female role models, whereas in Star Trek, all the women were either aliens or wore short skirts.
The article is way off base. The problem has never been about putting females in lead roles, the problem is the fact that most women do not like math or science.
The sci-fi channel might as well be called the "soap operas in space" channel. Dallas, Days of our Lives, General Hospital...remember those? They're on sci-fi now, except the setting is outer space and the clothing is different. I'm all for woman enjoying science fiction, but that's not what's happening on sci-fi.
This is how wikipedia defines 'science fiction':
Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology upon society and persons as individuals.
I.e. you take a well known scientific concept...like a black hole, or parallel universes, or virtual reality, or quantum uncertainty...then you write a story around that concept, targetting the ways in which this bizarre scientific phenomena might change the way we live our lives. The whole reason this is compelling is because it's actually plausible that we'll see these scenarios in our lifetimes.
The sci-fi channel does the exact opposite. They take a dramatic story about people, and glom some irrelevant spacy/sciency stuff onto the story and call it science fiction. It's forgettable crap, and it completely ignores what makes science fiction great...the science! I'm all for women having an alternative to the lifetime channel and oprah, but it would be nice if they were drawn to actual science fiction...rather than 'Days of Our Lives in space'.
I really hope someone from Logitech is reading this article because I find their newer mice to be terribly uncomfortable. The MX1000 for instance requires you to grip it completely like a glove in order to get it to work, having to constanly 'grip' the mouse for hours while playing fps games is exhausting and totally annoying. I usually prefer to simply rest my wrist on the mousepad, and have my digit finger hover over the LMB. Whenever I need to move the mouse I pivot around where my wrist makes contact w/ the mousepad, or I lift my wrist up slightly and move it, ending back in the resting position w/ my wrist on the mousepad. I can sit at my computer and game for 10 hours like this comfortably. I didn't last 20 minutes using the MX1000.
So I ended up switching back to my old ball mouse simply because the ergonomics of the MX1000 were unbearable. I miss the high dpi, but certainly don't miss the hand cramps. Overall I'm much happier with the cheap $10 ball mouse than the $60 laser MX1000.
Or is this all a ploy to recapture the hearts of the public?
It is, and if the US would spend the money on the following we would all be a lot better off:
1) Renewable Energy R&D(petroleum costs are the single greatest drag on the world economy) 2) Nanotechnology (for a programmable autonomous robotics infrastructure) 3) Broadband (How much would it really cost to get everyone 30Mbps? If 250 million people could video-conference and telecommute, how much gas would that save?)
I'm perfectly content going to mars or the moon via my home theatre and PC thankyou.
This is why you don't put your faith in freshmen (or 1/3 of the stuff in medical journals, but that's a separate issue).
Fair enough but the MIT team did achieve ignition using fixed mirror placements and just 127 flat 1 square foot mirrors.
The 'freshmen' failed because there was no visual reference point for aiming. When 100 other 'bright spots' are aiming at the same target you, there is no way of telling which bright spot is yours so it's impossible to make the proper adjustments to focus your beam onto the target.
So, the only real constraint is providing a means of manually aiming the mirror properly. I'm not an optics expert...but if there's a way to design a sighting device, perhaps like a sextant, then the myth of 3000 soldiers with 5'-square bronze shields incinerating a ship could easily be true.
(1 square foot)X127=127(MIT achieved ignition with this, roughly 1100 F) vs. (5 square feet)X3000=15,000(Grecian army w/ bronze shields)
That's a massive magnification factor of about 120X. 120X the ignition luminance(cd/m2) could vaporize the target instead of igniting it.
What kind of people honestly go out and spend almost 1,000$ USD on a card every year? What benefits are there? Despite the fact that these hot, sexy cards come out, I don't see any real push to get software out that uses them.
You need a card like this, or two 7800gts in SLI to run games on this badboy.
4XAA at 1920X1080 can send your comp to its knees.
I don't expect a bunch of slashdot liberals to understand this, but the current administration and majority party in Congress are all about SMALLER gov't. They stand for smaller, less intrusive gov't getting OUT OF THE WAY of the free market. Things like a broadcast flag do not need to be legislated...
You know, if you guys would put down the Mother Jones, Village Voice, and Covert Action Quarterly you MIGHT learn a little something about conservatism.
lol, if you really think that's what the current administration is doing please read me sig.
This is 100% correct. I suffer from Paranoid Personality Disorder mixed in with anxiety and there is an inherent component of the "disorder" that would keep you from getting help in the first place. Some number of people with true paranoia or strong enough anxiety would not want to contact anyone for help in the first place. As avoidance, being worried about the interaction, denying any actual problem, etc.
I'm in the same boat as you =/, taking Seroquel for Paranoid Schizophrenia...you're absolutely right about the disease making the patient even more reluctant to seek help because they're so afraid of the consequences. Really a terrible illness.
fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of "outrage", and deceptive business practices.
Slashdot Mirror
And the 500 wireless router hops it would take you just to get a packet across a small city would give you how many minutes of lag?
Well, you've got me there. But I can dream can't I? *wipes tears from eyes*
None of what you just said refutes my post in the least.
I outlined the ideal schenario...a very possible future that would benefit all of us vastly
Of course you'll need connections between the lily pads, and of course that's not free. But if you have enough computing power and enough harddisk capacity there is potential for mirroring and other techniques that would still allow us to 'keep our internet' without having to pay an arm and a leg to regional telecom monopolies. 0.0001% of our income tax could finance the hi-band repeaters between islands.
The parent article was asking if wireless is overhyped...I was trying to show that it's underhyped, which I truly believe it is.
Is There Too Much Enthusiasm Over Wireless?
There's not enough enthusiasm for wireless!
Wireless could allow consumers to free themselves from the regional telecom monopolies' grasp and transform internet access from a monthly pay-service into a single expense commodity market. That's a tremendous gain for consumers as commodity markets are much more competitive and offer far better flexibility of choice. It will be a wonderful day when wireless allows us to abandon the Bells and the Alltels that are blocking the development of better telecom and broadband.
Which world would you rather live in?
A) Paying $45 a month for 1.5mbps down / 128 mbps up
B) Paying $90 every two years(wireless hub upgrade) for 10mbps down / 10mpbs up
I can't think of a better advancement in communications than having legions of consumer owned WAPs create a freely useable broadband mesh.
I have to admit I'm upset my comment (parent) wasn't modded up. Is there a particular reason why my question is not appropriate or interesting?
Do you ever look back at your older episodes and wonder if a particular myth was busted mistakenly? For instance, a few weeks ago here at Slashdot we discussed the 'Archimedes Death Ray' myth. There were several of us including myself who thought the myth was plausible given a sighting method for the shields. One reader even quoted an RAF airman procedure for aiming a signal mirror at a passing plane. That seemed very much like the missing piece of the Death Ray puzzle.
Do your producers give you the flexibility to revisit previous myths like these?
We really don't have time or funds to go through a developer recruiting cycle, create a practice, get the team "gelled" etc. What we'd really like to do is find a small pre-existing team which which we could form a relationship to get our product out the door and possibly continue working with.
If you've got a problem and no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire . . . The Dev Team
A guy who writes FIVE seperate languages just for a book is a hardcore geek. I mean he invented Elvish (including Quenya and Sindarin), Dwarvish (Khuzdul), Entish, and Black Speech. He might not have been a technology geek but he was definitly a geek.
Yep, a linguist geek. From his biography:
Even as a young boy, Tolkien loved languages. He invented his own, but his mother viewed them as a waste of his time. "As a child, I was always inventing languages. But that was naughty," Tolkien recalled wryly. "Poor boys must concentrate on getting scholarships. When I was supposed to be studying Latin and Greek, I studied Welsh and English. When I was supposed to be concentrating on English, I took up Finnish."
Through the door of language Tolkien entered the world of myth. "The seed [of the myth] is linguistic, of course. I'm a linguist and everything is linguistic--that's why I take such pains with names." A language, he believed, could not remain abstract. It must arise within a history and a culture--or, if lacking that, a mythology. Soon he would create for his own languages a most elaborate world indeed.
How many authors write stories like that? It's almost as if the story was an afterthought created by the linguistics. I.e. the linguistics were so rich that a story grew around them.
Most authors write like this: Story(as a rough outline) -> Characters(including setting) -> Details(such as language, customs, etc.)
as opposed to Tolkien who did the opposite:
Tolkien: Language -> Culture -> Characters -> Story
Robert E. Howard is the only other fantasy author I can think of who wrote like that, except Howard built his stories (Conan) over a predetermined geography rather than a predermined language. Interestingly, both J.R.R. Tolkein and Robert E. Howard wrote fantasy in the 1930s, and are considered pillars of the genre.
he parents filed a suit against Blizzard Entertainment on Wednesday, saying their son jumped to his death while reenacting a scene from the game
Ahahahahaaa!! AHAHAaahahahaha! *breath* Ahahahahaaahahaha!
Personally I don't give much for the Alien films, but it's a matter of taste.
The reason I think it's there is because 'space movies' are mostly about life in space.
The original Alien film exposed a lot of possibilities, and left a lot of questions unanswered. The biology of the Alien creature was so bizarre and unfamiliar...it seemed as if maybe the laws of chemistry and physics were being broken, but then again...maybe they weren't. This was something that noone had seen before, or imagined...and instead of being another movie with a 'guy in a rubber suit' the director managed to create something horrifyingly believable. Bottom line: The film does an excellent job of consistently maintaining its plausibility, which is very hard to do in science fiction.
Some people liken Alien to a 'haunted house movie' in space, but the film also succeeds in creating a deep sense of uncertainty and lack of knowledge about space. It asks the question, what do we really know about what's out there? Most other 'space films' mess that part up, and 'earth-apomorphize' space. Alien however, is truly alien.
The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation
This is like giving an enemy instructions on how to attack you, not very bright.
If there's any group of people on the planet who want the internet disolved it's politicians and people in power. The internet is a tool for democratization, it gives 'the people' a voice. Hollywood, the music industry, the broadcast industry, the political 'industry' all wish the internet was never invented...keep telling them stuff like that and they may finally uninvent it.
Lawyers are destroying this country, heck they practically own it. 90% of congress are lawyers, 9/10 medical suits are frivolous and the 'industry' of medical law is about playing the averages. In my home state of Georgia(USA) medical practioners have their own insurance union, they lose 1 Billion dollars a year defending against frivolous lawsuits. Only 1 in 10 of those suits actually stick...it's practically extortion.
Likewise, recent changes to IP are one of the worst things to happen to science and industry. Used correctly IP has its place in prompting innovation, but lawyers are turning IP into something strictly to leverage lawsuits with. That doesn't benefit customers, scientific organizations or industry leaders...but it does syphon mountains of cash to the IP lawyers.
Revenge of the Sith comes out on DVD today, and there's an interesting article on Slate dissecting the now-complete trilogy
All I can say is that I'm very grateful to have episodes IV, V, and VI in their original untouched format. IMO they are the only films deserving to be called the 'Star Wars Trilogy'.
The others films are an embarrassment at best.
Well, if somebody actually made a TV series like that, I would be drawn to it. Unfortunately, that has yet to happen. The average person, irrespective of gender, isn't very interested in maths or science, and until that changes we are not going to be seeing any hard SF on TV. It's the diluted product, or nothing.
I think it's delusional to say math and science interest isn't dominated by the male gender. At least 3/4 of every math/science major is male.
As far as the dilution from hard sci-fi...I think the sci-fi channel's attempt to draw the female audience into its viewership has dramatically diluted the science content of their programming. IMO it was a very unfortunate way to draw female viewers...because it excluded and pushed away male viewers like myself who value hard(i.e. based on actual science) science fiction. I used to watch sci-fi, I don't anymore.
People have an impression of sci-fi fans being small men who sit in the dark watching Star Trek but it's not like that now ... There has been an increase in positive female role models, whereas in Star Trek, all the women were either aliens or wore short skirts.
The article is way off base. The problem has never been about putting females in lead roles, the problem is the fact that most women do not like math or science.
The sci-fi channel might as well be called the "soap operas in space" channel. Dallas, Days of our Lives, General Hospital...remember those? They're on sci-fi now, except the setting is outer space and the clothing is different. I'm all for woman enjoying science fiction, but that's not what's happening on sci-fi.
This is how wikipedia defines 'science fiction':
Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology upon society and persons as individuals.
I.e. you take a well known scientific concept...like a black hole, or parallel universes, or virtual reality, or quantum uncertainty...then you write a story around that concept, targetting the ways in which this bizarre scientific phenomena might change the way we live our lives. The whole reason this is compelling is because it's actually plausible that we'll see these scenarios in our lifetimes.
The sci-fi channel does the exact opposite. They take a dramatic story about people, and glom some irrelevant spacy/sciency stuff onto the story and call it science fiction. It's forgettable crap, and it completely ignores what makes science fiction great...the science! I'm all for women having an alternative to the lifetime channel and oprah, but it would be nice if they were drawn to actual science fiction...rather than 'Days of Our Lives in space'.
I really hope someone from Logitech is reading this article because I find their newer mice to be terribly uncomfortable. The MX1000 for instance requires you to grip it completely like a glove in order to get it to work, having to constanly 'grip' the mouse for hours while playing fps games is exhausting and totally annoying. I usually prefer to simply rest my wrist on the mousepad, and have my digit finger hover over the LMB. Whenever I need to move the mouse I pivot around where my wrist makes contact w/ the mousepad, or I lift my wrist up slightly and move it, ending back in the resting position w/ my wrist on the mousepad. I can sit at my computer and game for 10 hours like this comfortably. I didn't last 20 minutes using the MX1000.
So I ended up switching back to my old ball mouse simply because the ergonomics of the MX1000 were unbearable. I miss the high dpi, but certainly don't miss the hand cramps. Overall I'm much happier with the cheap $10 ball mouse than the $60 laser MX1000.
Or is this all a ploy to recapture the hearts of the public?
It is, and if the US would spend the money on the following we would all be a lot better off:
1) Renewable Energy R&D(petroleum costs are the single greatest drag on the world economy)
2) Nanotechnology (for a programmable autonomous robotics infrastructure)
3) Broadband (How much would it really cost to get everyone 30Mbps? If 250 million people could video-conference and telecommute, how much gas would that save?)
I'm perfectly content going to mars or the moon via my home theatre and PC thankyou.
This is why you don't put your faith in freshmen (or 1/3 of the stuff in medical journals, but that's a separate issue).
Fair enough but the MIT team did achieve ignition using fixed mirror placements and just 127 flat 1 square foot mirrors.
The 'freshmen' failed because there was no visual reference point for aiming. When 100 other 'bright spots' are aiming at the same target you, there is no way of telling which bright spot is yours so it's impossible to make the proper adjustments to focus your beam onto the target.
So, the only real constraint is providing a means of manually aiming the mirror properly. I'm not an optics expert...but if there's a way to design a sighting device, perhaps like a sextant, then the myth of 3000 soldiers with 5'-square bronze shields incinerating a ship could easily be true.
(1 square foot)X127=127(MIT achieved ignition with this, roughly 1100 F)
vs.
(5 square feet)X3000=15,000(Grecian army w/ bronze shields)
That's a massive magnification factor of about 120X. 120X the ignition luminance(cd/m2) could vaporize the target instead of igniting it.
Can anyone recommend a good chat-room for sufferers of Paranoid Schizophrenia?
For the second game developer interview in a row +5 modded questions about linux ports of the games have been posted and ignored
The reason this question is never asked is because the answer is always the same.
What kind of people honestly go out and spend almost 1,000$ USD on a card every year? What benefits are there? Despite the fact that these hot, sexy cards come out, I don't see any real push to get software out that uses them.
You need a card like this, or two 7800gts in SLI to run games on this badboy.
4XAA at 1920X1080 can send your comp to its knees.
I don't expect a bunch of slashdot liberals to understand this, but the current administration and majority party in Congress are all about SMALLER gov't. They stand for smaller, less intrusive gov't getting OUT OF THE WAY of the free market. Things like a broadcast flag do not need to be legislated...
You know, if you guys would put down the Mother Jones, Village Voice, and Covert Action Quarterly you MIGHT learn a little something about conservatism.
lol, if you really think that's what the current administration is doing please read me sig.
This is 100% correct. I suffer from Paranoid Personality Disorder mixed in with anxiety and there is an inherent component of the "disorder" that would keep you from getting help in the first place. Some number of people with true paranoia or strong enough anxiety would not want to contact anyone for help in the first place. As avoidance, being worried about the interaction, denying any actual problem, etc.
I'm in the same boat as you =/, taking Seroquel for Paranoid Schizophrenia...you're absolutely right about the disease making the patient even more reluctant to seek help because they're so afraid of the consequences. Really a terrible illness.
There's your first tip. After all, there's not much point in strategizing about 'when to leave' when the IT job market is non-existent.
fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of "outrage", and deceptive business practices.
My god that was beautiful.
It's all George Lucas' fault, Seriously! That guy redefined movie-making in the 70s and 80s, and then single-handedly destroyed it in the 90s and 00s!
Episode I) Fool us once, shame on you.
Episode II) Fool us twice, shame on us...
Episode III) Fool us three times, screw this shit.