Let us imagine a cylinder of empty space with radius r = 5mm and length l = 10 meters. Allowing for any kind of medium in this space (fiber, copper, neutron-star matter, etc...), what is the maximum throughput in principle of this communication channel?
In other words, I've been wondering lately if there is an upper-bound (in principle) on bandwidth. Like how there is a speed limit for light, is there something similar for information transmission?
That is a specific example. Here is an equally specific counter: imagine many-eyes viewing a sudden gaybashing about to take place and quickly notifying the police to stop the violent act. The result of pervasive public cameras would indeed have social ramifications, and a nice warm effect on that individuals continuing well-being and life.
Finally, why would you use an example of someone doing something private in public? The fact this individual is in public already opens the possibility of them being exposed...
I think public surveillance is here to stay due to technological advancement, and I want to make sure it is an advancement which is available to EVERYONE - not just some shadowy few.
Meh, I'm not motivated enought to make any stronger arguments, but was fun talking with you about this.
Internet-connected cameras often have lousy digital security themselves, so anyone could watch what the camera sees. To restore privacy, we should ban the use of internet-connected cameras aimed where and when the public is admitted, except when carried by people
I've actually thought that open and accessible cameras in public are a good idea - so long as they are accessible by the public. To me this would be akin to the many-eyes philosophy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus's_Law
I think you are making the point that a richer Virtual Reality environment can bring one closer to, or perhaps even exceed, the experience and benefits of real-life meetings. I agree in theory.
At this time it seems that the number of things that a virtual meeting has over a person-to-person or physical meeting are limited, and apparently less in quantity or quality than physical meetings (I will not enumerate them #TODO two-column pro-con list of current virtual vs. physical meetings).
I think there is theoretically more things that a virtual meeting COULD offer, but the technology is not yet there.
A very weak, but simple analogy: It took a while before the majority of overseas travel was done by aircraft.
I mean why do we assume that something we create, if run out of our control, will be destructive? I imagine it is because the machines we have built in the past have always needed a human to tell them what to do - they have had little or no 'brains'. These dumb machines and creations if left to their own devices will run off the track, go haywire or explode. Humans have always been needed to channel the energies of these creations.
But now we have self-driving cars.
I think our robots will escape our control one day just as not so long ago we escaped the kings'. So I suspect that a future of self-creating machines will be more evolutionary than revolutionary and that there will be no, or exceedingly few, beheadings.
For the majority of us, the vast majority of our day involves saying "hi", smiling, putting things in the trashbin, paying for our lunch, holding the door open for someone, thinking about hanging out with friends over the weekend and other stuff which is just plain good. We call it 'neutral', but most of it is good.
So when given extra power, we tend to do good things with it...at least at first.
When someone wins the lottery or gets a big bonus, they tend to throw a party and buy stuff for themselves AND their friends.
Doing nice things makes us feel good. Thinking of harming others is just not pleasant for most of us. Thinking of bad things is not pleasant.
I believe we do, however, spend a lot of time thinking about bad things, and so we tend to get this false feeling that everything and everyone else is bad.
It's that whole opposite charges attract deal. Because people are so generally good, we have a strange attraction to generally bad things.
But generally we're good.
When predicting, there are always factors of uncertainties OR unknowns. I wonder if you would be willing to recall some of your predictions and give a few examples. What I would like to know is:
What are some things you didn't (or don't) know about but which you could (or can) predict if they would (or will) happen?
What are some things you did (or do) know about but couldn't (or can't) predict if they would (or will) happen?
I guess I've asked two questions actually, but maybe you could have predicted I would do that from the comment subject;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QShvDj12xBc
"This is the concept for a 10,000 Meter ( 30,000 Foot), ballon-supported space gun.
The tube or barrel is 0.6 Meters (2 feet) in diameter, so it is intended for launching very small payloads.
It is unknown how plausable this is,.
The goal is to get above 10K meters, as the atmosphere is less than 50% as dense as sea level, thus friction should be low and momentum from accelleration up the tube or barrel should encounter less resistance."
It's such a funky concept, I know. But I think it is at least rather different than most space gun concepts.
Skepticism and criticism is most welcome.
You've both got it completely wrong. The universe is inherently neutral, and people are neutral objects which interact via positive, negative and neutral actions.
The human species relies upon social structure for survival. Positive, negative and neutral interactions occur within and without that structure.
If too much positive occurs, the attraction for negative is increased. If too much negative, positive is attracted.
What we call 'peace' is a neutral state - but in nature there are two stabilities: static and dynamic. The USA does a great job with the dynamic stability, but it still wobbles a bit.
Static stability seems appealing then, but it comes with no growth. That is a problem because life must grow.
In other words, humans are intrinsically physical objects existing in deterministic, but unpredicable, system. Their actions are a mix of positive and negative charge, with an apparent slant (judging for examples by more laugh tracks than screaming in sitcoms and the relative rarity of killing sprees vs beer fests) towards positive.
This general positive activity is the thing which (one might say ironically) causes to emerge a definite and persistent negative attraction.
Balloons seem like an excellent and flexible launch element which could offer a ton of altitude and avoidance of at least some friction. Have you heard of or considered this?
Normally I try to be original in my posts, but in this case I just want to say thank you.
well ok, I want to say thank you AND that slashdot has been, to me, THE nexus of wisdom (both in abundance and lack thereof) on the vast internet world wide web 2.0 blogosphere cloud net network.
Take it easy, and thank you again for the creation of this great monolith of chaos, cosmos and wisdom.
It makes me happy that slashdot (so to speak) was so physically close to this last launch (but not too close!;)
It's almost like you were some spirit of our combined hopes and dreams present to see-off this incarnation of their embodiment.
If our hopes and dreams remain true, the next incarnation will be greater.
Thank you for having been there for the last, and I hope (soon) you will be there for the first launch of the next.
It is amazing, isn't it, that so called blinding, cold, hard facts hold the true comfort and beauty of reality. I must admit, though, that It is not hard for me to see why so many cower from them.
It is easy, too, I think, to see how the blanket of ignorance would seem so warm and inviting. Alas, how do we still fail to show so many that it is a numbness, not a warmth and a vacuum not an invitation?
Perhaps we simply cannot show them, they must see for themselves.
Maybe abandoning bad ideas is something which cannot be taught, only learned.
Humanitarianism is my bag. I love people, even with all our ignorance and hypocrisy I truly believe (based on evidence) 99% of people are 99% heart. Even the 'dumbest' people I've spoken with never fail to enlighten me of my own ignorances and hypocries - and thus I grow!
People are good. Homo sapiens are good. Cultures....
Despite my optimism, however, lately I'm becoming convinced that we must evolve (like literally change genetically or mentally or physically) before we can persist in space, indefinitely independent of mother earth. I'm almost convinced this evolution must be to the degree of speciation...but I dare not tread on that ground...or dare I?
I'm going to wax poetic and philosophical here, forgive me. These are my thoughts - maybe they belong in my journal, but here they are.
Humanity is turning it's focus inward. This is not necessarily bad. I hope, and do believe ( weakly I must admit) that this is a global 'soul searching' time - but I must accept the possibility that we might instead be 'navel gazing' ourselves away.
Africa, 50,000 years ago. Some people moving north-east or north-west maybe noticed it was getting colder, but it was worth it to get away. Away from whatever it was they left - probably the same thing we always leave, bad environments both natural and man-made. Some moved only so far and then stayed where they were, they didn't want it to get colder.
Some of them, however, kept going, despite the harshness.
The Explorers.
New frontiers are discovered by Explorers, populated by Escapers and developed by Exploiters: the three E's.
We needed only to evolve our culture to survive in those harsh areas, and a little bit of selection helped in other subtle ways. Nowadays it is different.
There is no more land. There are no places on earth for the explorers, the escapers and the exploiters to go. We can't run away from bad societies like we have for millennia...
So we are forced, for the first time in Earth's history, to fix the whole world or leave it.
When Columbia launched, according to my mother, I watched 8 hours of the broadcast. All the way from the astronauts' breakfast to the press conference past the launch. I didn't move.
I guess even at that age we humans are capable of grasping the awesome and extraordinary quality of certain events.
I don't know why I'm posting, except perhaps that through my whole life I have felt a deep attachment to space exploration, science and technological achievement (all of which I've always considered to coincide with humanitarianism, if not cause). The space shuttle has been the icon, the embodiment of that attachment and love.
Lief Ericson made it to america first, but managed to stay only for a short while. It would be 500 more years before explorers returned from Europe (and not in the best form, it should be said).
I know we from Earth will return, and I hope and believe it will not be 500 more years.
Among the ignorant, of course there is anti-intellectualism: this is by nature. I think among the intelligent, however, there is a sentiment of antiestablishmentarianism.
The two sentiments maybe coincide and so have a combined effect to erode the public faith in institutional education, but amoung geeks, the intelligent and the educated it's not anti-intellectualism.
I am not unintelligent. Throughout school, however, I did terribly. This is not a new story.
There is perhaps a growing feeling or perception that current education is mostly about memorization at the great expense of imagination.
Imagination is creation.
Memorization is indoctrination.
I love to hear a great theory, but I love to hear a great argument to it even more.
It feels like your argument leaves the phonemic domain promptly when you state - "In the same way, some languages have a complex synthetic syntax...".
Syntax and pattern are the befuddling aspects of language this theory abandons. That in itself is the primary power of this theory. To draw a comparison between the base sounds of a languages and the interface of it's components seems invalid to me.
An analogy might be if we were to draw a comparison between the elements in a substance and the structure of that substance. Various atomic elements can substitute for each other and result in indistinguishable structures - like sodium chloride or potassium flouride both form cubes.
In other words, if you want to figure out the 'more base' substance, looking at the structures they form will not help.
The analogy can be perhaps extended by using stellar nucleosynthesis as an example of language formation - the 'oldest' or 'highest-generation' stars and their surrounding satellites have the most number of t elements.
In a sense, the San are the 'oldest' region of the 'language universe' and have had the longest time to perform 'linguistic nucleosynthesis' - although much of the structures they form appear identical to newer languages because various elements match-up similarly, even though they are drastically different.
Not to oppose caution, but since I believe your attitude is older than science itself, In reply, I'm just going to quote another slashdotter's comment...
"'you can't improve upon the performance of your brain and your body without longterm tradeoffs'
i hate that kind of defeatist, "nature/god knows best" attitude. everything you have right now is thanks to people who believed they could do better than nature, and they did. yes, you shouldn't do lines of coke to be better at your job, because that is a hack. it doesn't mean we can't make ourselves truly better, without "overclocking" and burning out. a candle that burns twice as bright could burn out twice as fast, or it could simply be a fucking light bulbthat lasts 5 years."
It is strange that even though I know it is wrong to spend the time that I do micro-managing the lives of imaginary entities when it would be better to spend such time finding ways to help the less fortunate, I still feel a direct connection to this false reality of my computer.
I, like most geeks on this site, dontate regularly and frequently to many chairities. This makes me feel good. But beyond the donation I must be honest that I don't really spare much more thought (except on the donations I submit for research - since said research has often captured my imagination thus prompting the donation) on the people who I am apparently helping.
It seems it all just stems from the limited perception of our senses and the bounds of our imaginations. When I think about the hunger of my sim vs. the hunger of a child my rational mind knows there is absolutely no comparison whatsoever: none. The real world child is all that matters - not bits and bytes.
But the animalistic part of me feels much more sharply the "pain" of my simulated human - since it is an immediate entity well within my perception and thus my animalistic side sees the remedy of its situation as more "realistic" and more benificial to me.
I think there are perhaps two bonding mechanisms then of the human: that of the emotional bonding, and that bonding of the imagination.
It would seem the sims has prompted imaginary bonding by exploiting my emotions.
The bonding with a starving child would then be an emotional bonding attained by exploiting my imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
Let us imagine a cylinder of empty space with radius r = 5mm and length l = 10 meters. Allowing for any kind of medium in this space (fiber, copper, neutron-star matter, etc...), what is the maximum throughput in principle of this communication channel?
In other words, I've been wondering lately if there is an upper-bound (in principle) on bandwidth. Like how there is a speed limit for light, is there something similar for information transmission?
That is a specific example. Here is an equally specific counter: imagine many-eyes viewing a sudden gaybashing about to take place and quickly notifying the police to stop the violent act. The result of pervasive public cameras would indeed have social ramifications, and a nice warm effect on that individuals continuing well-being and life. Finally, why would you use an example of someone doing something private in public? The fact this individual is in public already opens the possibility of them being exposed... I think public surveillance is here to stay due to technological advancement, and I want to make sure it is an advancement which is available to EVERYONE - not just some shadowy few. Meh, I'm not motivated enought to make any stronger arguments, but was fun talking with you about this.
Internet-connected cameras often have lousy digital security themselves, so anyone could watch what the camera sees. To restore privacy, we should ban the use of internet-connected cameras aimed where and when the public is admitted, except when carried by people
I've actually thought that open and accessible cameras in public are a good idea - so long as they are accessible by the public. To me this would be akin to the many-eyes philosophy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus's_Law
At this time it seems that the number of things that a virtual meeting has over a person-to-person or physical meeting are limited, and apparently less in quantity or quality than physical meetings (I will not enumerate them #TODO two-column pro-con list of current virtual vs. physical meetings).
I think there is theoretically more things that a virtual meeting COULD offer, but the technology is not yet there.
A very weak, but simple analogy: It took a while before the majority of overseas travel was done by aircraft.
(lazy users love AC)
What could possibly go right?
Gold Goo?
I mean why do we assume that something we create, if run out of our control, will be destructive? I imagine it is because the machines we have built in the past have always needed a human to tell them what to do - they have had little or no 'brains'. These dumb machines and creations if left to their own devices will run off the track, go haywire or explode. Humans have always been needed to channel the energies of these creations.
But now we have self-driving cars.
I think our robots will escape our control one day just as not so long ago we escaped the kings'. So I suspect that a future of self-creating machines will be more evolutionary than revolutionary and that there will be no, or exceedingly few, beheadings.
What do you see as the ultimate destiny of the human species? Where do you think will we be in a million years?
For the majority of us, the vast majority of our day involves saying "hi", smiling, putting things in the trashbin, paying for our lunch, holding the door open for someone, thinking about hanging out with friends over the weekend and other stuff which is just plain good. We call it 'neutral', but most of it is good. So when given extra power, we tend to do good things with it...at least at first. When someone wins the lottery or gets a big bonus, they tend to throw a party and buy stuff for themselves AND their friends. Doing nice things makes us feel good. Thinking of harming others is just not pleasant for most of us. Thinking of bad things is not pleasant. I believe we do, however, spend a lot of time thinking about bad things, and so we tend to get this false feeling that everything and everyone else is bad. It's that whole opposite charges attract deal. Because people are so generally good, we have a strange attraction to generally bad things. But generally we're good.
When predicting, there are always factors of uncertainties OR unknowns. I wonder if you would be willing to recall some of your predictions and give a few examples. What I would like to know is:
;)
What are some things you didn't (or don't) know about but which you could (or can) predict if they would (or will) happen?
What are some things you did (or do) know about but couldn't (or can't) predict if they would (or will) happen?
I guess I've asked two questions actually, but maybe you could have predicted I would do that from the comment subject
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QShvDj12xBc
"This is the concept for a 10,000 Meter ( 30,000 Foot), ballon-supported space gun.
The tube or barrel is 0.6 Meters (2 feet) in diameter, so it is intended for launching very small payloads.
It is unknown how plausable this is,.
The goal is to get above 10K meters, as the atmosphere is less than 50% as dense as sea level, thus friction should be low and momentum from accelleration up the tube or barrel should encounter less resistance."
It's such a funky concept, I know. But I think it is at least rather different than most space gun concepts. Skepticism and criticism is most welcome.
Just trying to think outside the sphere.
You've both got it completely wrong. The universe is inherently neutral, and people are neutral objects which interact via positive, negative and neutral actions.
The human species relies upon social structure for survival. Positive, negative and neutral interactions occur within and without that structure.
If too much positive occurs, the attraction for negative is increased. If too much negative, positive is attracted.
What we call 'peace' is a neutral state - but in nature there are two stabilities: static and dynamic. The USA does a great job with the dynamic stability, but it still wobbles a bit.
Static stability seems appealing then, but it comes with no growth. That is a problem because life must grow.
In other words, humans are intrinsically physical objects existing in deterministic, but unpredicable, system. Their actions are a mix of positive and negative charge, with an apparent slant (judging for examples by more laugh tracks than screaming in sitcoms and the relative rarity of killing sprees vs beer fests) towards positive. This general positive activity is the thing which (one might say ironically) causes to emerge a definite and persistent negative attraction.
The End.
The Legal Personality
Without a green screen they'd have had to have an acutual elevator.
And that, students, is how the space elevator was finally made.
I ( and many others ) have been thinking about balloon assisted launch systems recently.
Balloons seem like an excellent and flexible launch element which could offer a ton of altitude and avoidance of at least some friction. Have you heard of or considered this?
I love the caliber of cynics we have on slashdot! After all, skepticism is knowledge's greatest ally, but logic is it's greatest friend.
0 within 'our' reach, certainly.
But what about 'their' reach?
"The Indonesian province of West Papua is home to an estimated 44 uncontacted tribal groups.[16]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Guinea#People
Normally I try to be original in my posts, but in this case I just want to say thank you.
well ok, I want to say thank you AND that slashdot has been, to me, THE nexus of wisdom (both in abundance and lack thereof) on the vast internet world wide web 2.0 blogosphere cloud net network.
Take it easy, and thank you again for the creation of this great monolith of chaos, cosmos and wisdom.
It makes me happy that slashdot (so to speak) was so physically close to this last launch (but not too close! ;)
It's almost like you were some spirit of our combined hopes and dreams present to see-off this incarnation of their embodiment.
If our hopes and dreams remain true, the next incarnation will be greater.
Thank you for having been there for the last, and I hope (soon) you will be there for the first launch of the next.
It is amazing, isn't it, that so called blinding, cold, hard facts hold the true comfort and beauty of reality. I must admit, though, that It is not hard for me to see why so many cower from them.
:)
It is easy, too, I think, to see how the blanket of ignorance would seem so warm and inviting. Alas, how do we still fail to show so many that it is a numbness, not a warmth and a vacuum not an invitation?
Perhaps we simply cannot show them, they must see for themselves.
Maybe abandoning bad ideas is something which cannot be taught, only learned.
Learned the hard way, eh?
Maybe that's the best way
That is depressing.
Humanitarianism is my bag. I love people, even with all our ignorance and hypocrisy I truly believe (based on evidence) 99% of people are 99% heart. Even the 'dumbest' people I've spoken with never fail to enlighten me of my own ignorances and hypocries - and thus I grow!
People are good. Homo sapiens are good. Cultures....
Despite my optimism, however, lately I'm becoming convinced that we must evolve (like literally change genetically or mentally or physically) before we can persist in space, indefinitely independent of mother earth. I'm almost convinced this evolution must be to the degree of speciation...but I dare not tread on that ground...or dare I?
I'm going to wax poetic and philosophical here, forgive me. These are my thoughts - maybe they belong in my journal, but here they are.
Humanity is turning it's focus inward. This is not necessarily bad. I hope, and do believe ( weakly I must admit) that this is a global 'soul searching' time - but I must accept the possibility that we might instead be 'navel gazing' ourselves away.
Africa, 50,000 years ago. Some people moving north-east or north-west maybe noticed it was getting colder, but it was worth it to get away. Away from whatever it was they left - probably the same thing we always leave, bad environments both natural and man-made. Some moved only so far and then stayed where they were, they didn't want it to get colder.
Some of them, however, kept going, despite the harshness.
The Explorers.
New frontiers are discovered by Explorers, populated by Escapers and developed by Exploiters: the three E's.
We needed only to evolve our culture to survive in those harsh areas, and a little bit of selection helped in other subtle ways. Nowadays it is different.
There is no more land. There are no places on earth for the explorers, the escapers and the exploiters to go. We can't run away from bad societies like we have for millennia...
So we are forced, for the first time in Earth's history, to fix the whole world or leave it.
I hope, and believe, we can, and will, do both.
When Columbia launched, according to my mother, I watched 8 hours of the broadcast. All the way from the astronauts' breakfast to the press conference past the launch. I didn't move.
I guess even at that age we humans are capable of grasping the awesome and extraordinary quality of certain events.
I don't know why I'm posting, except perhaps that through my whole life I have felt a deep attachment to space exploration, science and technological achievement (all of which I've always considered to coincide with humanitarianism, if not cause). The space shuttle has been the icon, the embodiment of that attachment and love.
Lief Ericson made it to america first, but managed to stay only for a short while. It would be 500 more years before explorers returned from Europe (and not in the best form, it should be said).
I know we from Earth will return, and I hope and believe it will not be 500 more years.
Among the ignorant, of course there is anti-intellectualism: this is by nature. I think among the intelligent, however, there is a sentiment of antiestablishmentarianism.
The two sentiments maybe coincide and so have a combined effect to erode the public faith in institutional education, but amoung geeks, the intelligent and the educated it's not anti-intellectualism.
I am not unintelligent. Throughout school, however, I did terribly. This is not a new story.
There is perhaps a growing feeling or perception that current education is mostly about memorization at the great expense of imagination. Imagination is creation. Memorization is indoctrination.
we already ruled out the sun as a driver of climate change....
My sarcasm detector is in the shop again, so I must explicitly observe that the sun is, and has always been, the primary driver of climate.
Climate has never needed us to change it, just as species have never needed us to extinct them.
Things like this don't need us, but they are happy to take our help.
Especially at anthropomorphizing themselves - they love our help there.
Good argument.
I love to hear a great theory, but I love to hear a great argument to it even more.
It feels like your argument leaves the phonemic domain promptly when you state - "In the same way, some languages have a complex synthetic syntax...".
Syntax and pattern are the befuddling aspects of language this theory abandons. That in itself is the primary power of this theory. To draw a comparison between the base sounds of a languages and the interface of it's components seems invalid to me.
An analogy might be if we were to draw a comparison between the elements in a substance and the structure of that substance. Various atomic elements can substitute for each other and result in indistinguishable structures - like sodium chloride or potassium flouride both form cubes.
In other words, if you want to figure out the 'more base' substance, looking at the structures they form will not help.
The analogy can be perhaps extended by using stellar nucleosynthesis as an example of language formation - the 'oldest' or 'highest-generation' stars and their surrounding satellites have the most number of t elements.
In a sense, the San are the 'oldest' region of the 'language universe' and have had the longest time to perform 'linguistic nucleosynthesis' - although much of the structures they form appear identical to newer languages because various elements match-up similarly, even though they are drastically different.
Not to oppose caution, but since I believe your attitude is older than science itself, In reply, I'm just going to quote another slashdotter's comment...
"'you can't improve upon the performance of your brain and your body without longterm tradeoffs'
i hate that kind of defeatist, "nature/god knows best" attitude. everything you have right now is thanks to people who believed they could do better than nature, and they did. yes, you shouldn't do lines of coke to be better at your job, because that is a hack. it doesn't mean we can't make ourselves truly better, without "overclocking" and burning out. a candle that burns twice as bright could burn out twice as fast, or it could simply be a fucking light bulbthat lasts 5 years."
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1855778&cid=34136968
I would love to see what kind of worlds and creatures you might create with Spore.
a downer, perhaps. But relevant, certainly.
It is strange that even though I know it is wrong to spend the time that I do micro-managing the lives of imaginary entities when it would be better to spend such time finding ways to help the less fortunate, I still feel a direct connection to this false reality of my computer.
I, like most geeks on this site, dontate regularly and frequently to many chairities. This makes me feel good. But beyond the donation I must be honest that I don't really spare much more thought (except on the donations I submit for research - since said research has often captured my imagination thus prompting the donation) on the people who I am apparently helping.
It seems it all just stems from the limited perception of our senses and the bounds of our imaginations. When I think about the hunger of my sim vs. the hunger of a child my rational mind knows there is absolutely no comparison whatsoever: none. The real world child is all that matters - not bits and bytes.
But the animalistic part of me feels much more sharply the "pain" of my simulated human - since it is an immediate entity well within my perception and thus my animalistic side sees the remedy of its situation as more "realistic" and more benificial to me.
I think there are perhaps two bonding mechanisms then of the human: that of the emotional bonding, and that bonding of the imagination.
It would seem the sims has prompted imaginary bonding by exploiting my emotions.
The bonding with a starving child would then be an emotional bonding attained by exploiting my imagination.