Let me clarify: when I was young -- I'm dating myself here -- I quite liked the original TV series. But when the movie-length trailer for ST:TNG first aired in the UK in the late eighties? It was hate on first sight.
It is quite immature to judge a book by its cover.
And since then, it's also been hate on sight between me and just about every space operatic show on television. ST:Voyager and whatever the space station opera; check. Babylon Five? Ditto. Battlestar Galactica? Didn't even bother turning on the TV. I hate them all.
Yes, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise were quite space-operatic. But not TOS and TNG (at least until Rodenberry died). A space opera show contains lots of interpersonal conflicts and emotions. TNG is especially criticized by fans of TOS/DS9/BSG/B5 (check out the StarTrek.com forums if you don't believe me) as containing little material on interpersonal relations.
At his recent keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.
He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.
"It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."
Bullshit. Such a thing would be obvious if it was as Ron Moore describes. There is a lot of technobabble in TNG, especially in the later years, but Star Trek was never strictly about technology and its consequences.
As you probably guessed, this is not how I write SF -- in fact, it's the antithesis of everything I enjoy in an SF novel.
Ok, you may not enjoy it, but thousands have enjoyed Star Trek and BSG and DS9 and all the other shows. So? is your sci-fi some how better because it focuses more on the technology?
SF, at its best, is an exploration of the human condition under circumstances that we can conceive of existing, but which don't currently exist (either because the technology doesn't exist, or there are gaps in our scientific model of the universe, or just because we're short of big meteoroids on a collision course with the Sea of Japan -- the situation is improbable but not implausible).
And Star Trek does not contemplate on that at all? you might have missed mr Spock and Lt Cmdr Data then!!!! and there are lots of other examples...
You want to deflect that civilization-killing asteroid? You need to find some way of getting there. It's going to be expensive and difficult, and there's plenty of scope for human drama arising from it.
Except if your civilization has developed Faster-Than-Light travel...then your problem of 'getting there' is non-existent.
Of course I hope you realize that finding a way to get to the asteroid is no more different than finding a way to avoid a supernova explosion...the technological scale is different, but the essence is the same: a group of people is trying to solve a problem.
much as integrated circuits are useful and allow the mobile phone industry to exist and to add cheap camera chips to phones: and cheap camera chips in phones lead to happy slapping or sexting and other forms of behaviour that, thirty years ago, would have sounded science fictional.
Bullshit again. People have been playing pranks (even violent ones) on others and exchanging sex-related material for centuries.
An alternative to UAC is the complete resource virtualization: a user may seem to change the system files, but in reality he changes his own copy of system files, leaving the system intact.
This would allow much greater compatibility with older software, and it would not change the way software was developed on Windows. There wouldn't need be a 'home directory', since Windows users are accustomed to have the root directory as their home folder.
So, I don't think that "UAC is absolutely needed". UAC is one solution, but there are other solutions as well.
Nuclear propulsion can easily move us to the furthest points of our Solar System with ease. Gravity produced by rotation can solve the bone loss problems. A Nuclear energy source can also provide enough power to build an electromagnetic shield around the spacecraft (make the spacecraft a large dynamo, just like Earth) and enough power for smaller craft that can be used for landing to planets.
It would cost a lot to build such a big spaceship, and it could only be built in space, but there is no alternative, really. Such a ship would allow mankind to go near each and every solar system body and also land in Mars and other rocky planets.
So MIT is not looking for highly skilled technicians but for highly skilled entrepreneurs. Perhaps it should then be renamed to MIE, i.e. Massachusetts Institute of Entrepreneurship.
Communication skills are overrated. Those people that are willing to listen always get the message. It's only when people are too deeply entrenched in their own way of thinking that communication skills are really valuable. Most ideas are simple anyway and if well understood, then they can be easily transmitted.
Oh please...can we have a true sci-fi series? one that the captain does not save the universe, there are no love stories and nobody has drinking problems? one that does not involve a war and aliens fighting for supremacy?
I like B5, but it's a long way from a proper sci-fi series...
This taxation thing must be abolished. The KISS principle applies to governments as well. Do you want roads? pay for them. Do you want hospitals? ports? airports? etc...the same. Pay directly for those works and cut the middle man.
And if you don't want homeless people, accept the fact that some people are unlucky or lazy and pay for them as well. You'll get social peace and decreased criminality.
And if you worry about social inequalities, pay proportionally to your profits.
These systems are not for catching the bad guys. They may occasionally be caught, but the main purpose of these surveillance systems is to scare the masses so as that the masses do not overthrow the governments.
Remember 1789? the elite were caught and hanged in Bastille by the people...that's what terrifies the elite...that we, the common folks, might realize one day our power and the level of fraud(*) the elite has committed against us and retaliate the hard way, i.e. invade their homes, take them out and hang them in Trafalgar square...
1) I would built my own computer platform - hardware, operating system and software that would be state of the art; a quantum leap in programmability, usability, reliability and performance.
2) try to solve the AI problem.
3) help alternative physics models research, cold fusion, antigravity, zero point energy etc
Could it be that we can't pinpoint the exact position and velocity of an electron at the same time because they are interlinked with all the surrounding particles? i.e. the act of measurement affects the outcome.
A reality show creates emotion. Science does not. That's the core of the problem. People choose things that will increase their dopamine levels, because, deep down, we are animals.
An AI can built a more efficient AI, but not a cleverer AI. The laws of the universe prohibit that: assume that HAL (the computer from Space Odyssey 2001) can build a cleverer HAL (HAL-2). HAL-2 can solve at least one mathematical problem that HAL can not solve, since HAL-2 is cleverer than HAL; otherwise HAL-2 would not be cleverer than HAL. But if HAL-2 is cleverer than HAL, than HAL is equally clever to HAL-2, because HAL can solve the problems HAL-2 can solve by creating HAL-2!!!! The above is illogical, of course, because HAL can not be less clever and equally clever to HAL-2 at the same time. Therefore, HAL can not create HAL-2.
(I suspect the above has something to do with Turing Machines, universality, the halting problem and Godel's incompleteness theorems. Perhaps a mathematician can shed some light into this.)
The drive to pro-create (that's what he is talking about) is purely an emotional need and has nothing to do with intelligence. It is our instinct to survive that drive us to procreate. Unless a machine is programmed to have that instinct, nothing will be done.
If a trip to Mars costs $600 billion, then with a little more money we could build a real spaceship and use it to travel to Mars and other places in the solar system. The ship would have:
1) artificial gravity using rotation. 2) nuclear propulsion. 3) small crafts that can land and take off from planets.
Such a ship could get to relativistic speeds, according to project Orion...near 10% of speed of light, theoretically. Mars' closest distance to Earth is 54.6 million km. With 0.1c speed, Mars can be reached at approximately 120 minutes, i.e. two hours (the average distance between Mars and Earth is around 12.5 light minutes). In reality, a trip of about 100 days is not that long, compared to the 600 days trip to Mars.
We should stop fearing nuclear power. It's a tremendous force, we must use it for the right purposes.
1) legal system. You can't have a global patent system without having the same concepts of law and the same laws. 2) paychecks. 3) prices. It goes with #2. Right now, companies take their business elsewhere because they are cheaper to operate. If everything was at the same price and paychecks were similar, there would not be an incentive to do so.
Of course the above ain't gonna happen soon or ever. So I don't see how the patent system can be globalized...
Re:The Well of Uncomfortable Truths
on
Coders At Work
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you, but I also agree with the COSA guy a little bit. In my experience, programs that are built in a reactive way (reactions attached to signals) are easier to maintain. I have recently finished a not-to-large application for our customer that did quite a lot of changes in the requirements. I had the provision of separating components and use a signal & slot mechanism for when components needed to do something with other components. The result was that I could easily mix and match components, up to a certain degree of course.
I don't think the visualization medium matters in a significant way. Either diagrams or text does the job. What is significant is to model components based on signals and reactions.
It was easy back then because the stuff to discover was much easier to discover. Now that we have done the easy stuff, we have the hard stuff to discover, which may take many many years.
Bats avoid collisions, although they fly very close to each other and they are blind. They have a nice radar system that disallows collisions. The same could be done for flying vehicles.
Slashdot Mirror
It is quite immature to judge a book by its cover.
Yes, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise were quite space-operatic. But not TOS and TNG (at least until Rodenberry died). A space opera show contains lots of interpersonal conflicts and emotions. TNG is especially criticized by fans of TOS/DS9/BSG/B5 (check out the StarTrek.com forums if you don't believe me) as containing little material on interpersonal relations.
Bullshit. Such a thing would be obvious if it was as Ron Moore describes. There is a lot of technobabble in TNG, especially in the later years, but Star Trek was never strictly about technology and its consequences.
Ok, you may not enjoy it, but thousands have enjoyed Star Trek and BSG and DS9 and all the other shows. So? is your sci-fi some how better because it focuses more on the technology?
And Star Trek does not contemplate on that at all? you might have missed mr Spock and Lt Cmdr Data then!!!! and there are lots of other examples...
Except if your civilization has developed Faster-Than-Light travel...then your problem of 'getting there' is non-existent.
Of course I hope you realize that finding a way to get to the asteroid is no more different than finding a way to avoid a supernova explosion...the technological scale is different, but the essence is the same: a group of people is trying to solve a problem.
Bullshit again. People have been playing pranks (even violent ones) on others and exchanging sex-related material for centuries.
An alternative to UAC is the complete resource virtualization: a user may seem to change the system files, but in reality he changes his own copy of system files, leaving the system intact.
This would allow much greater compatibility with older software, and it would not change the way software was developed on Windows. There wouldn't need be a 'home directory', since Windows users are accustomed to have the root directory as their home folder.
So, I don't think that "UAC is absolutely needed". UAC is one solution, but there are other solutions as well.
That's not really bad. It moves the PC market forward.
And let's not forget French Captains...take Picard for example: in the first real difficulty he has, he says "we surrender".
Nuclear propulsion can easily move us to the furthest points of our Solar System with ease. Gravity produced by rotation can solve the bone loss problems. A Nuclear energy source can also provide enough power to build an electromagnetic shield around the spacecraft (make the spacecraft a large dynamo, just like Earth) and enough power for smaller craft that can be used for landing to planets.
It would cost a lot to build such a big spaceship, and it could only be built in space, but there is no alternative, really. Such a ship would allow mankind to go near each and every solar system body and also land in Mars and other rocky planets.
So MIT is not looking for highly skilled technicians but for highly skilled entrepreneurs. Perhaps it should then be renamed to MIE, i.e. Massachusetts Institute of Entrepreneurship.
Communication skills are overrated. Those people that are willing to listen always get the message. It's only when people are too deeply entrenched in their own way of thinking that communication skills are really valuable. Most ideas are simple anyway and if well understood, then they can be easily transmitted.
Oh please...can we have a true sci-fi series? one that the captain does not save the universe, there are no love stories and nobody has drinking problems? one that does not involve a war and aliens fighting for supremacy?
I like B5, but it's a long way from a proper sci-fi series...
Hey, it's captain James T. Kirk! he can screw the Universe and multiple times!!!
well, if Chuck Norris let him...
Microsoft's SxS system is pure bureaucracy. Linux's versioned DLL system is a much better and simpler solution.
This taxation thing must be abolished. The KISS principle applies to governments as well. Do you want roads? pay for them. Do you want hospitals? ports? airports? etc...the same. Pay directly for those works and cut the middle man.
And if you don't want homeless people, accept the fact that some people are unlucky or lazy and pay for them as well. You'll get social peace and decreased criminality.
And if you worry about social inequalities, pay proportionally to your profits.
These systems are not for catching the bad guys. They may occasionally be caught, but the main purpose of these surveillance systems is to scare the masses so as that the masses do not overthrow the governments.
Remember 1789? the elite were caught and hanged in Bastille by the people...that's what terrifies the elite...that we, the common folks, might realize one day our power and the level of fraud(*) the elite has committed against us and retaliate the hard way, i.e. invade their homes, take them out and hang them in Trafalgar square...
(*)20% of the population owns 80% of wealth.
1) I would built my own computer platform - hardware, operating system and software that would be state of the art; a quantum leap in programmability, usability, reliability and performance.
2) try to solve the AI problem.
3) help alternative physics models research, cold fusion, antigravity, zero point energy etc
...is to be buried deep down under ground and never see the face of the Earth again.
What I mean is that we don't need browsers, we need a code/data distribution system that lazily downloads application components/data.
Could it be that we can't pinpoint the exact position and velocity of an electron at the same time because they are interlinked with all the surrounding particles? i.e. the act of measurement affects the outcome.
A reality show creates emotion. Science does not. That's the core of the problem. People choose things that will increase their dopamine levels, because, deep down, we are animals.
Mr Aldrin should have known that renting an outdoor filming studio costs a lot more these days...
I started my comment with this:
An AI can built a more efficient AI, but not a cleverer AI. The laws of the universe prohibit that: assume that HAL (the computer from Space Odyssey 2001) can build a cleverer HAL (HAL-2). HAL-2 can solve at least one mathematical problem that HAL can not solve, since HAL-2 is cleverer than HAL; otherwise HAL-2 would not be cleverer than HAL. But if HAL-2 is cleverer than HAL, than HAL is equally clever to HAL-2, because HAL can solve the problems HAL-2 can solve by creating HAL-2!!!! The above is illogical, of course, because HAL can not be less clever and equally clever to HAL-2 at the same time. Therefore, HAL can not create HAL-2.
(I suspect the above has something to do with Turing Machines, universality, the halting problem and Godel's incompleteness theorems. Perhaps a mathematician can shed some light into this.)
The drive to pro-create (that's what he is talking about) is purely an emotional need and has nothing to do with intelligence. It is our instinct to survive that drive us to procreate. Unless a machine is programmed to have that instinct, nothing will be done.
They used a Flying Shark, obviously.
If a trip to Mars costs $600 billion, then with a little more money we could build a real spaceship and use it to travel to Mars and other places in the solar system. The ship would have:
1) artificial gravity using rotation.
2) nuclear propulsion.
3) small crafts that can land and take off from planets.
Such a ship could get to relativistic speeds, according to project Orion...near 10% of speed of light, theoretically. Mars' closest distance to Earth is 54.6 million km. With 0.1c speed, Mars can be reached at approximately 120 minutes, i.e. two hours (the average distance between Mars and Earth is around 12.5 light minutes). In reality, a trip of about 100 days is not that long, compared to the 600 days trip to Mars.
We should stop fearing nuclear power. It's a tremendous force, we must use it for the right purposes.
How about:
1) legal system. You can't have a global patent system without having the same concepts of law and the same laws.
2) paychecks.
3) prices. It goes with #2. Right now, companies take their business elsewhere because they are cheaper to operate. If everything was at the same price and paychecks were similar, there would not be an incentive to do so.
Of course the above ain't gonna happen soon or ever. So I don't see how the patent system can be globalized...
I agree with you, but I also agree with the COSA guy a little bit. In my experience, programs that are built in a reactive way (reactions attached to signals) are easier to maintain. I have recently finished a not-to-large application for our customer that did quite a lot of changes in the requirements. I had the provision of separating components and use a signal & slot mechanism for when components needed to do something with other components. The result was that I could easily mix and match components, up to a certain degree of course.
I don't think the visualization medium matters in a significant way. Either diagrams or text does the job. What is significant is to model components based on signals and reactions.
It was easy back then because the stuff to discover was much easier to discover. Now that we have done the easy stuff, we have the hard stuff to discover, which may take many many years.
Bats avoid collisions, although they fly very close to each other and they are blind. They have a nice radar system that disallows collisions. The same could be done for flying vehicles.