I'm with you in that a an electronic book-reading device would have to be stupidly cheap and hassle-free in order to attract me. But the main reason why isn't the money, but that it's going to be almost impossible to improve on the aesthetic form factor of traditional books. Ultimately, the Kindle is likely to be just as futile as every other electronic book reader that's been tried before, and for the same reason: people just don't want to read large amounts of text on an electronic screen. That's why the market for books has grown explosively alongside the consumer electronics and computers markets in the last 15 years.
So here's my solution: shift book production to the end consumer.
This is the same model that is FINALLY being applied to the music market. 11 years ago some friends and I tried - and failed - to start an online service that would let users download music and then burn CDs and print labels and jewel-case covers on their own machines in an easy, one-click process. But it took 8 years for the content rights to get released, and of course even then only to the big companies, and so now that we finally have iTunes et all CDs are nearly obsolete anyway. But the idea would have worked back then, if the content had been available for licensing.
Switch to books: book 'technology' is not going to become obsolete like CDs did, but it does face the same DRM issues. Since it looks like those are finally getting sorted out by Google and Amazon and others, what we need is a one-click system that creates a finished book. I would spend $500 for a printer that could print and bind books for me, if it meant that the price of books dropped by 50+ percent - I buy at least $1000 of books each year. Just like music, and just like photography. More and more people produce prints of their pictures at home, despite the fact that for a long time decent photo-quality printers were expensive.
Shifting production to the end consumer is logical on a number of levels, but mainly because - like for music and photos - it eliminates the middle-men: publishers and merchants. In the long run scenario, authors - just like musicians - would no longer need a publisher or agent to get their material out there. Instead, they would just need to create something that is genuinely good, and the marketplace itself will value it up through word of mouth. That's the way free markets are supposed to work. And like with music, the final scenario requires only ONE centralized DRM system that content gets protected and 'published' through, and that should be government-owned and -operated - or at least nonprofit - rather than the system we have now: an unregulated cartel comprised of the 'Big Five' publishers whose oligopoly in the marketplace screws both artists/authors and consumers with its ludicrous combination of greed (CDs for $20 and only $2 goes to the artist?) and inefficiency (incompatible formats, incompatible vendors, rootkits, etc).
This is interesting stuff, although from the article the issue doesn't seem to be closed completely. But even if it was a single migration event, that doesn't mean there wasn't subsequent trading contact - we know that happened on the East coast of North America long before Columbus, and it would be fascinating to see a full account of the West coast evidence. That's something I've heard rumors about but have never actually seen.
It says 'only' 800 deaths resulted, but last time I checked there were plenty of fates worse than death, and severe radiation sickness is probably one of them.
They don't care about its size and they do care about its performance.
I, for one, no longer have a desktop PC. There isn't much point, since I hardly do any gaming anymore, and I can take my laptop with me wherever I go. But since it is basically a desktop replacement, I NEED the big screen. It's not about processor power to me anymore, it's about ease of use - and that means screen real estate. I hated small screens even when they were the only game in town. I've been complaining about monitor size since long before widescreens and flat panels were around - it's been a beef of mine since back when a BIG screen meant a 17" monitor. And this was in the days before mice and keyboards were wireless. Today we're no longer chained to same box the screen connects to - so why on earth would I want to sit any closer to the screen than 10 feet?
Even today, monitors are still MUCH too small. If you think I'm being silly, well, I heard all the same objections 15 years ago when I said 14" screens were tiny and we would one day all have monitors bigger than the biggest TV screen (which at the time was around 60"). My TV/home theater screen? A projector with a 14-FOOT diagonal. THAT'S what you need in order to really watch a movie or a football game. 60" widescreen? Well, to me, that's finally approaching a decent size for a computer monitor.
1. Psychology is highly relevant to this particular issue. There are issues of debate where psychology is irrelevant, and in those debates the invocation of psychology can, under certain circumstances, be condemned as a "dirty trick." This is not one of them.
2. You seem to be confused about the meaning of the term 'mysterious'. In the sense used by Dennett, it connotes more than simply 'the unknown'. Of course science must embrace the challenges posed by the unknown as the only mechanism of making forward progress - that goes without saying. But it is quite another thing altogether to believe that mystery=meaning. This is the basis of being a 'Murky', and there is no evidence for this belief; rather, there is a great deal of evidence to the contrary.
If you haven't already, you should read Dan Dennett's books. What distinguishes Dennett from Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and the other high-profile atheists is that he doesn't just demolish belief in religion, the supernatural, God or a divine intelligence as Creator. Instead, he thoroughly explores both the psychology and the philosophy of belief.
From your post, you sound like what Dennett refers to as a 'Murky'. 'Supers' believe in supernatural causation; 'Brights' believe in logic; and 'Murkies' want the universe to retain its mystery because that makes life, the universe and everything more meaningful to them. Deists and agnostics are typically 'Murkies'.
The 'Brights' position is the only one that is supported by logic, reason and evidence, and therefore the only position that can really claim that it is 'probably correct'. But the others are worth thinking about and discussing. Whether you will come to agree that your own current viewpoint arises out of denial and wishful thinking or not will be a much more interesting intellectual journey for you than any of the tired old debates about the existence of God or the validity of Creationism.
average users require fewer resources than even today's cheapest PCs have
You're much more right than you probably realize. As one of Slashdot's older readers, I remember quite clearly when it was possible to be productive - browse the web, email, office applications - with a machine with a 50 MB hardrive, 8 MB of RAM and a 150Mhz CPU. Shouldn't it be painfully obvious that even the cheapest machine today, being orders of magnitude more powerful than the machines of yesteryear, should be more than capable of handling the same basic functions? And yet your statement does seem fresh and somewhat profound. Why should that be?
Pardon my tinfoil hat, but it seems that the point we've really reached isn't one where any PC is powerful enough to run the basic productivity applications - they all are, and have been for 10 years - but rather one where all PCs, even the cheapest ones, are too powerful to be deliberately stymied by Windows and other OSs. It seems to me to be a software issue, not a hardware issue.
I'm not going to say all Creationists are dumb. I've met a few who aren't
Anyone who supports a premise that is so overwhelming contradicted by evidence from a thousand different intersecting angles is either extremely stupid (stupid encompasses denial and wishful thinking) or extremely ignorant. Either you don't understand, or you don't know any better. Take your pick.
This comment is particularly ill-conceived, even for Slashdot Star Wars posts. The prequels are dull, but not because they are backstory. If someone asks you, "what's Christianity all about?" you can answer them in a handful of paragraphs, but that doesn't make the entire 'backstory' of the Bible "dull" because "there's no tension and no surprise." Literature is rich with wonderful exposition of 'backstory'. Even individual stories can be enthralling when they explore 'backstory', which is why the technique of jumping around chronologically in fiction is so widespread.
The Star Wars prequels were awful for precisely the same reason that 99% of Hollywood films are awful: terrible writing and terrible directing.
The headline and the article both muddily imply that the identification of life on earth fundamentally different than what we are already familiar with would, in itself, be evidence that the life was of 'alien' origin. I can't help but think this is deliberate in order to hype the story. Is there a chance that there is weird terrestrial life on earth we haven't yet discovered? Of course. Is there a chance there is alien life on earth? Yes. But which of the two would be a more likely explanation for the origin of something unusual? I think the answer is obvious, and I think it's exceedingly disingenuous to state or imply otherwise.
I'm trying to imagine less enjoyable way to read a book than on an electronic screen the size of a post-it, but I'm not having much luck. Maybe the audio version by Fran Drescher?
That may be true, but as a grad student returning to college after 10 years, I can definitely say that email isn't what it once was, even to college students.
When email first went mainstream in the mid 1990s, it was a bit like when phones first went mainstream: getting an email (or call) was a big event, and everyone was attentive and responsive, utilizing the new technology with a glorious combination of wonder and gusto. Now, the same thing that happened to telephones has happened to email: we take the technology for granted, and so it has ceased to be a much-appreciated modern marvel and has become as much a burden as a blessing.
The parallel evolution of email and phones continues in one important way in particular: just as with phones we began to avoid responding to people (employing first answering machines, and later voicemail), we now avoid responding to emails. Only with email, there is no equivalent of the answering machine. In other words, there's no excuse. My personal experience is that email is immensely frustrating, because it takes people forever to respond. Days go by waiting for responses to emailed business inquiries from companies that in bygone eras would have bent over backwards to answer the phone and cater instantly to a customer's needs. A college professor of mine recently took over a week to respond, and only after 4 emails and a message on his voicemail. His excuse: "sorry, I've been really busy." Too busy to reply to an email? When chances are he's in front of a computer, online, for several hours out of every day?
Other examples abound, from colleagues to family to business transactions. To echo the parent poster's words, my personal experience says that for every person who responds within minutes to an email message, there are twenty others in my contact list who I'm lucky to hear back from on the same day. What would Alexander Graham Bell thought of that?
a tool that is encrypted and can run any type of scan, transfer any file or edit any document on your computer. That can't be right.
If playing WOW or any other online game on your computer presents a hazard to that computer, the solution would seem to be to play it on a dedicated machine - one where you don't have any files or confidential data to worry about. That then immediately points to the value of a dedicated gaming box, and from there it's just a hop skip and jump to consoles... Now, wasn't the X-Box originally supposed to be a PC gaming console? That idea sort of got lost along the way somewhere it seems.
An alternative might be a genuine virtual machine for games running on your PC, but... well, I'll leave it to the experts to point out the problems that presents.
Give me a minute here to figure out... what this implies... about newer MS operating systems... urrrrmmmmm.... DAMN. I thought I had it there for a second, but your comment's significance has eluded me...
Liquid nitrogen is the cooling answer, for sure. Then you're not dependent upon power of any kind at all. The nitrogen dissipates as it warms, just like how a pool stays cool on a hot day by 'sweating' through evaportation, and you just top up the tanks when you run low. It's cheap and it's simple. That's why critical cold storage applications like those in the biomedical industry don't use 'chillers' or refrigerators or anything like that. If you really want to put something on ice and keep it cold, you use liquid nitrogen.
I think it has 8 engines in four nacelles. I take your point about multiplying the critical failure points, however. Nevertheless, their site claims that the vehicle has the ability to lose multiple engines and still allow for a controlled landing - albeit not a vertical one. If you've seen their latest design, their is a proper wing as well - gone are the days of the flying piano... sadly, in my opinion, as it looked quite Star-Treky back then.
Actually, as I understand it the Moller Skycar has 8 engines in 4 nacelles. That makes for quite a bit of redundancy. And like many small aircraft, it will be outfitted with an emergency vehicle-parachute system.
The idea of a roadable fixed-wing aircraft is just about as old as flight itself. I've seen black and white film clips of these sorts of things driving down urban streets, to give you an idea of how long the notion has been around. For whatever reason, it just hasn't ever caught on.
The Moller skycar is a little more revolutionary, since it takes off and lands vertically, and since it has multiple engines - how many of these Transitions are going to be crashed by celebrities when the one engine conks out? But Moller's stuff has been vaporware for twenty years, so don't hold your breath.
In the real world, a company run like the TSA wouldn't have a spare $500K to throw a party because they would be out of business, replaced by a more efficient contractor that does a better job.
this is the single most useful phone I've ever owned, and that is largely because of the Google Maps application I installed on it, post purchase.
I'm sure I'll be the millionth person on slashdot to point this out, but I now use Google Maps as the Yellow Pages. And I don't mean in the silly sense - because of course 10 years ago GPS systems in cars were programmed to tell you where all the nearest restaurants and gas stations were. I'm talking about something that is genuinely as content-rich as the Yellow Pages. Today, for example, I searched for veterinary offices because my dog is sick. You're not likely to turn up much for that search on your car's GPS - yet, anyway. I didn't do it by going to the actual yellow pages book, or by going to yellowpages.com, I did it by going to Google Maps - for the obvious reason that Dvorak apparently misses entirely: if I look up the phone number of a place, I might as well get its location at the same time, without having to call the place and ask them where they are located - if I'm lucky enough to get through to an actual person, that is. Moreover, most Google Maps listings give other useful information, namely business hours, which often aren't in the phonebook.
The point here, to reiterate the parent post, is that a handheld device running a maps/phonebook/GPS combo - whether google maps or otherwise - is a very, very useful device indeed.
the current patent system makes making trivial improvements on existing drugs (hence extending monopoly protection) much more profitable than researching new drugs (high risk of failing to produce anything)
You're right of course, but it bears elaborating: profit is what drives innovation in private industry, and there is much more profit in technological innovation than in pharmacological (not medical) innovation. One example: a drug that patients/customers must take daily to treat a disease will be vastly more profitable than a drug which cures the disease. Therefore, there is little incentive to develop cures for diabetes, heart disease, etc. Another example: there is more profit is lifestyle drugs (Viagra, Rogaine) than in lifesaving drugs (malaria, antibiotics).
From these and other examples, it becomes clear why what R&D that is still being done by the industry goes not into revolutionary, Star-Trek-style treatments, but rather into lifestyle and maintenance drugs.
Lastly, despite what we so often hear, R&D expenditures have not kept pace with skyrocketing profit in the last 15 years. Pfizer, for example, has seen its profit increase by a factor of 9 in the last 7 years while it's R&D has only increased by a factor of 3. When they're flush with cash, why did they choose to shut down their primary US research facility (in Ann Arbor, Michigan, my hometown)? Answer: because the mission of the company isn't to make drugs that improve our lives; it's to make as much profit as possible. Since, in this industry, those two goals don't line up, we see a sterling example of what economists call market failure.
intelligence will inevitably entail compassion, love, and all the other emotions we have
Nonsense. Our emotions evolved as a result of selection pressures to force individual humans to be nice to one another and cooperate. These qualities have nothing to do with intelligence - emotions are present in other animals with far less intelligence than humans. There is further clear evidence to be found individuals with emotional deficits, such as people with specific types of autism and certain forms of brain injuries (see the books of Oliver Sacks for more detailed case studies). Psychopaths and sociopaths, for another example, lack the capacity for empathy, guilt, fear, and other 'normal' emotional responses. But they do not lack intelligence.
Intelligent machines will only have human-like emotions, and their accompanying moral values, if they are designed that way. We must take great care to impose these qualities, a la Asimov's Laws of Robotics, or we will be creating hyper-intelligent mechanical psychopaths. It is extraordinarily naive to assume that intelligent machines will be benevolent merely as a consequence of their intelligence. A psychopathic version of Commander Data - his evil 'twin' Lore - gives an idea of the dangers involved.
That's like using Norton as your antivirus. Find some freeware or open source one that does just what you need and isn't overly complicated
This is a common refrain, and I must say I find it puzzling. What about Photoshop for photo editing? Or Avid for video editing? Or Quicken for accounting? Where are the freeware versions of those applications? MS office applications happen to have free alternatives in OpenOffice and NeoOffice and so on, but only as a result of monumental interest in staging a pushback against the M$ monopoly. Taking this fight to all companies producing software for some amount other than 'free' is just silly.
the statement that, "the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China" referring to hard drive technology just sounds a bit silly. I'd bet dollars to donuts that any technology latent in a commercial hard drive that the Chinese might be after can be reverse engineered right off the shelf. The only exception might be the encryption component, but - someone correct me here if I'm completely wrong - as I understand it 128-bit encryption is no longer restricted by the US government, presumably because they can break it, and that is why 128-bit is also the current 'limit' or whatever on commercial encryption products.
Slashdot Mirror
So here's my solution: shift book production to the end consumer.
This is the same model that is FINALLY being applied to the music market. 11 years ago some friends and I tried - and failed - to start an online service that would let users download music and then burn CDs and print labels and jewel-case covers on their own machines in an easy, one-click process. But it took 8 years for the content rights to get released, and of course even then only to the big companies, and so now that we finally have iTunes et all CDs are nearly obsolete anyway. But the idea would have worked back then, if the content had been available for licensing.
Switch to books: book 'technology' is not going to become obsolete like CDs did, but it does face the same DRM issues. Since it looks like those are finally getting sorted out by Google and Amazon and others, what we need is a one-click system that creates a finished book. I would spend $500 for a printer that could print and bind books for me, if it meant that the price of books dropped by 50+ percent - I buy at least $1000 of books each year. Just like music, and just like photography. More and more people produce prints of their pictures at home, despite the fact that for a long time decent photo-quality printers were expensive.
Shifting production to the end consumer is logical on a number of levels, but mainly because - like for music and photos - it eliminates the middle-men: publishers and merchants. In the long run scenario, authors - just like musicians - would no longer need a publisher or agent to get their material out there. Instead, they would just need to create something that is genuinely good, and the marketplace itself will value it up through word of mouth. That's the way free markets are supposed to work. And like with music, the final scenario requires only ONE centralized DRM system that content gets protected and 'published' through, and that should be government-owned and -operated - or at least nonprofit - rather than the system we have now: an unregulated cartel comprised of the 'Big Five' publishers whose oligopoly in the marketplace screws both artists/authors and consumers with its ludicrous combination of greed (CDs for $20 and only $2 goes to the artist?) and inefficiency (incompatible formats, incompatible vendors, rootkits, etc).
This is interesting stuff, although from the article the issue doesn't seem to be closed completely. But even if it was a single migration event, that doesn't mean there wasn't subsequent trading contact - we know that happened on the East coast of North America long before Columbus, and it would be fascinating to see a full account of the West coast evidence. That's something I've heard rumors about but have never actually seen.
It says 'only' 800 deaths resulted, but last time I checked there were plenty of fates worse than death, and severe radiation sickness is probably one of them.
I, for one, no longer have a desktop PC. There isn't much point, since I hardly do any gaming anymore, and I can take my laptop with me wherever I go. But since it is basically a desktop replacement, I NEED the big screen. It's not about processor power to me anymore, it's about ease of use - and that means screen real estate. I hated small screens even when they were the only game in town. I've been complaining about monitor size since long before widescreens and flat panels were around - it's been a beef of mine since back when a BIG screen meant a 17" monitor. And this was in the days before mice and keyboards were wireless. Today we're no longer chained to same box the screen connects to - so why on earth would I want to sit any closer to the screen than 10 feet?
Even today, monitors are still MUCH too small. If you think I'm being silly, well, I heard all the same objections 15 years ago when I said 14" screens were tiny and we would one day all have monitors bigger than the biggest TV screen (which at the time was around 60"). My TV/home theater screen? A projector with a 14-FOOT diagonal. THAT'S what you need in order to really watch a movie or a football game. 60" widescreen? Well, to me, that's finally approaching a decent size for a computer monitor.
/mostly serious
1. Psychology is highly relevant to this particular issue. There are issues of debate where psychology is irrelevant, and in those debates the invocation of psychology can, under certain circumstances, be condemned as a "dirty trick." This is not one of them.
2. You seem to be confused about the meaning of the term 'mysterious'. In the sense used by Dennett, it connotes more than simply 'the unknown'. Of course science must embrace the challenges posed by the unknown as the only mechanism of making forward progress - that goes without saying. But it is quite another thing altogether to believe that mystery=meaning. This is the basis of being a 'Murky', and there is no evidence for this belief; rather, there is a great deal of evidence to the contrary.
From your post, you sound like what Dennett refers to as a 'Murky'. 'Supers' believe in supernatural causation; 'Brights' believe in logic; and 'Murkies' want the universe to retain its mystery because that makes life, the universe and everything more meaningful to them. Deists and agnostics are typically 'Murkies'.
The 'Brights' position is the only one that is supported by logic, reason and evidence, and therefore the only position that can really claim that it is 'probably correct'. But the others are worth thinking about and discussing. Whether you will come to agree that your own current viewpoint arises out of denial and wishful thinking or not will be a much more interesting intellectual journey for you than any of the tired old debates about the existence of God or the validity of Creationism.
You're much more right than you probably realize. As one of Slashdot's older readers, I remember quite clearly when it was possible to be productive - browse the web, email, office applications - with a machine with a 50 MB hardrive, 8 MB of RAM and a 150Mhz CPU. Shouldn't it be painfully obvious that even the cheapest machine today, being orders of magnitude more powerful than the machines of yesteryear, should be more than capable of handling the same basic functions? And yet your statement does seem fresh and somewhat profound. Why should that be?
Pardon my tinfoil hat, but it seems that the point we've really reached isn't one where any PC is powerful enough to run the basic productivity applications - they all are, and have been for 10 years - but rather one where all PCs, even the cheapest ones, are too powerful to be deliberately stymied by Windows and other OSs. It seems to me to be a software issue, not a hardware issue.
Anyone who supports a premise that is so overwhelming contradicted by evidence from a thousand different intersecting angles is either extremely stupid (stupid encompasses denial and wishful thinking) or extremely ignorant. Either you don't understand, or you don't know any better. Take your pick.
This comment is particularly ill-conceived, even for Slashdot Star Wars posts. The prequels are dull, but not because they are backstory. If someone asks you, "what's Christianity all about?" you can answer them in a handful of paragraphs, but that doesn't make the entire 'backstory' of the Bible "dull" because "there's no tension and no surprise." Literature is rich with wonderful exposition of 'backstory'. Even individual stories can be enthralling when they explore 'backstory', which is why the technique of jumping around chronologically in fiction is so widespread.
The Star Wars prequels were awful for precisely the same reason that 99% of Hollywood films are awful: terrible writing and terrible directing.
The headline and the article both muddily imply that the identification of life on earth fundamentally different than what we are already familiar with would, in itself, be evidence that the life was of 'alien' origin. I can't help but think this is deliberate in order to hype the story. Is there a chance that there is weird terrestrial life on earth we haven't yet discovered? Of course. Is there a chance there is alien life on earth? Yes. But which of the two would be a more likely explanation for the origin of something unusual? I think the answer is obvious, and I think it's exceedingly disingenuous to state or imply otherwise.
I'm trying to imagine less enjoyable way to read a book than on an electronic screen the size of a post-it, but I'm not having much luck. Maybe the audio version by Fran Drescher?
That may be true, but as a grad student returning to college after 10 years, I can definitely say that email isn't what it once was, even to college students.
When email first went mainstream in the mid 1990s, it was a bit like when phones first went mainstream: getting an email (or call) was a big event, and everyone was attentive and responsive, utilizing the new technology with a glorious combination of wonder and gusto. Now, the same thing that happened to telephones has happened to email: we take the technology for granted, and so it has ceased to be a much-appreciated modern marvel and has become as much a burden as a blessing.
The parallel evolution of email and phones continues in one important way in particular: just as with phones we began to avoid responding to people (employing first answering machines, and later voicemail), we now avoid responding to emails. Only with email, there is no equivalent of the answering machine. In other words, there's no excuse. My personal experience is that email is immensely frustrating, because it takes people forever to respond. Days go by waiting for responses to emailed business inquiries from companies that in bygone eras would have bent over backwards to answer the phone and cater instantly to a customer's needs. A college professor of mine recently took over a week to respond, and only after 4 emails and a message on his voicemail. His excuse: "sorry, I've been really busy." Too busy to reply to an email? When chances are he's in front of a computer, online, for several hours out of every day?
Other examples abound, from colleagues to family to business transactions. To echo the parent poster's words, my personal experience says that for every person who responds within minutes to an email message, there are twenty others in my contact list who I'm lucky to hear back from on the same day. What would Alexander Graham Bell thought of that?
If playing WOW or any other online game on your computer presents a hazard to that computer, the solution would seem to be to play it on a dedicated machine - one where you don't have any files or confidential data to worry about. That then immediately points to the value of a dedicated gaming box, and from there it's just a hop skip and jump to consoles... Now, wasn't the X-Box originally supposed to be a PC gaming console? That idea sort of got lost along the way somewhere it seems.
An alternative might be a genuine virtual machine for games running on your PC, but... well, I'll leave it to the experts to point out the problems that presents.
Give me a minute here to figure out ... what this implies ... about newer MS operating systems... urrrrmmmmm.... DAMN. I thought I had it there for a second, but your comment's significance has eluded me...
Liquid nitrogen is the cooling answer, for sure. Then you're not dependent upon power of any kind at all. The nitrogen dissipates as it warms, just like how a pool stays cool on a hot day by 'sweating' through evaportation, and you just top up the tanks when you run low. It's cheap and it's simple. That's why critical cold storage applications like those in the biomedical industry don't use 'chillers' or refrigerators or anything like that. If you really want to put something on ice and keep it cold, you use liquid nitrogen.
Three cheers for outsourcing!
I think it has 8 engines in four nacelles. I take your point about multiplying the critical failure points, however. Nevertheless, their site claims that the vehicle has the ability to lose multiple engines and still allow for a controlled landing - albeit not a vertical one. If you've seen their latest design, their is a proper wing as well - gone are the days of the flying piano... sadly, in my opinion, as it looked quite Star-Treky back then.
Actually, as I understand it the Moller Skycar has 8 engines in 4 nacelles. That makes for quite a bit of redundancy. And like many small aircraft, it will be outfitted with an emergency vehicle-parachute system.
The Moller skycar is a little more revolutionary, since it takes off and lands vertically, and since it has multiple engines - how many of these Transitions are going to be crashed by celebrities when the one engine conks out? But Moller's stuff has been vaporware for twenty years, so don't hold your breath.
Maybe Blackwater, perhaps?
I'm sure I'll be the millionth person on slashdot to point this out, but I now use Google Maps as the Yellow Pages. And I don't mean in the silly sense - because of course 10 years ago GPS systems in cars were programmed to tell you where all the nearest restaurants and gas stations were. I'm talking about something that is genuinely as content-rich as the Yellow Pages. Today, for example, I searched for veterinary offices because my dog is sick. You're not likely to turn up much for that search on your car's GPS - yet, anyway. I didn't do it by going to the actual yellow pages book, or by going to yellowpages.com, I did it by going to Google Maps - for the obvious reason that Dvorak apparently misses entirely: if I look up the phone number of a place, I might as well get its location at the same time, without having to call the place and ask them where they are located - if I'm lucky enough to get through to an actual person, that is. Moreover, most Google Maps listings give other useful information, namely business hours, which often aren't in the phonebook.
The point here, to reiterate the parent post, is that a handheld device running a maps/phonebook/GPS combo - whether google maps or otherwise - is a very, very useful device indeed.
You're right of course, but it bears elaborating: profit is what drives innovation in private industry, and there is much more profit in technological innovation than in pharmacological (not medical) innovation. One example: a drug that patients/customers must take daily to treat a disease will be vastly more profitable than a drug which cures the disease. Therefore, there is little incentive to develop cures for diabetes, heart disease, etc. Another example: there is more profit is lifestyle drugs (Viagra, Rogaine) than in lifesaving drugs (malaria, antibiotics).
From these and other examples, it becomes clear why what R&D that is still being done by the industry goes not into revolutionary, Star-Trek-style treatments, but rather into lifestyle and maintenance drugs.
Lastly, despite what we so often hear, R&D expenditures have not kept pace with skyrocketing profit in the last 15 years. Pfizer, for example, has seen its profit increase by a factor of 9 in the last 7 years while it's R&D has only increased by a factor of 3. When they're flush with cash, why did they choose to shut down their primary US research facility (in Ann Arbor, Michigan, my hometown)? Answer: because the mission of the company isn't to make drugs that improve our lives; it's to make as much profit as possible. Since, in this industry, those two goals don't line up, we see a sterling example of what economists call market failure.
Nonsense. Our emotions evolved as a result of selection pressures to force individual humans to be nice to one another and cooperate. These qualities have nothing to do with intelligence - emotions are present in other animals with far less intelligence than humans. There is further clear evidence to be found individuals with emotional deficits, such as people with specific types of autism and certain forms of brain injuries (see the books of Oliver Sacks for more detailed case studies). Psychopaths and sociopaths, for another example, lack the capacity for empathy, guilt, fear, and other 'normal' emotional responses. But they do not lack intelligence.
Intelligent machines will only have human-like emotions, and their accompanying moral values, if they are designed that way. We must take great care to impose these qualities, a la Asimov's Laws of Robotics, or we will be creating hyper-intelligent mechanical psychopaths. It is extraordinarily naive to assume that intelligent machines will be benevolent merely as a consequence of their intelligence. A psychopathic version of Commander Data - his evil 'twin' Lore - gives an idea of the dangers involved.
This is a common refrain, and I must say I find it puzzling. What about Photoshop for photo editing? Or Avid for video editing? Or Quicken for accounting? Where are the freeware versions of those applications? MS office applications happen to have free alternatives in OpenOffice and NeoOffice and so on, but only as a result of monumental interest in staging a pushback against the M$ monopoly. Taking this fight to all companies producing software for some amount other than 'free' is just silly.
the statement that, "the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China" referring to hard drive technology just sounds a bit silly. I'd bet dollars to donuts that any technology latent in a commercial hard drive that the Chinese might be after can be reverse engineered right off the shelf. The only exception might be the encryption component, but - someone correct me here if I'm completely wrong - as I understand it 128-bit encryption is no longer restricted by the US government, presumably because they can break it, and that is why 128-bit is also the current 'limit' or whatever on commercial encryption products.