and the need to shove every port into a portable machine doesn't seem cost or space or energy efficient.
Which makes me wonder, why not have just one or two 'mother' ports and a peripheral that you can plug in to give yourself all the others you might need? Maybe that's what USB is supposed to be, but I look at my machine and USB doesn't seem very 'universal' to me. Video, sound, network and other stuff still on other ports. Is such a mother port impossible?
Like everyone else here, I understand the dichotomy between missions for scientific benefit and missions for inspiring mankind. Occassionally there is some crossover, but it is less common than we'd like. So when scientific missions like this asteroid one get cancelled in favor of inspiring missions like putting men on the Moon and Mars, it is easy to cry 'political agenda'. I'm not even sure htat's fair, but there it is.
But it's the missions that DO have good crossover that seem to me like they should be prioritized. And the best example I can think of are the missions to put up huge space telescopes to find a second Earth. Finding another Earth would be hugley inspiring, and as far as I understand it these scopes would be fantastic scientific instruments as well.
Am I the only one who was particularly sad to see these missions delayed?
I would be more interested to see how many manufacturers there are. A lot of the smaller brands use the same suppliers and assemble to pretty much the same specs as the bigger brands - that goes for everything from consumer electronics to things like PC hardware. It's kind of like a shirt from The Gap vs a shirt from Structure - they're all made in either the same Filipino sweatshop, or the sweatshop next door, and either way they use the same supplies. And that, of course, is where all the 'fakes' come from.
Of course, there is always the occassional flair of inspired creativity. I was in Asia recently and brought back a $5 'PolyStation' for a friend as a gag gift. It was a PS1 shell with about 500 NES roms built in - hilarious.
Whatever happened to 3D positional audio? Last I heard, Creative bought out Aureal and now we're stuck with EAX, which is pretty lousy as far as positional 3D audio goes. Aureal had full-on binaural algorithms in development, so that (at least with headphones on) a whisper over your shoulder really sounded like a whisper over your shoulder. Adding more speakers is a pretty hack solution compared to the elegant stuff that was, at least once upon a time, in the works.
While it is a valid point to say that Slashdot is supposed to be about technology free from the shackles of politics, technology divorced from socio-political context is profoundly dangerous.
Einstein had a few things to say along the same lines, for example, when we were developing nukes. There was also a good line in Jurassic Park that encapsulated this idea well, referring to recreating dinosaurs of course, that went something like, "just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should."
This idea is also at the center of the stem cell and cloning debates.
If Slashdot really is "news for nerds, stuff that matters," then we nerds should be intelligent enough to discuss technology in its full human context, not just on the lab table in our ivory towers of idealism and naivity. I think most of us here are smart enough not to have to bury our heads in the sand.
TV needs to take some lessons from advertising in other media. Now that TV no longer has a captive audience, there needs to be more innovative and entertaining content in their commercials. Think Burma Shave. If content spanned several ads with an evlolving storyline or some sequence of material, then people might actually be interested in following along. The idea of embedded puzzles isn't bad, but it doesn't have broad appeal - there will just be a small contingent of people interesting in cracking it, as we saw with BMW films a few years back.
A better (as in more effective) approach would be to develop some characters and tell some funny little stories that actually have people compelled to see the next 'chapter' in the series. Infuriatingly catchy musical ditties are always a plus.
My guess is that history will repeat itself. The newsletters and pamphlets that eventually became what call newspapers started out as much more personalized expressions of opinion by those few with the resources to broadcast their views. The ones that became popular evolved into monolithic commercial enterprises pandering to the popular views of one or another group (political, religious, ethnic - take your pick). The biggest of them eventually all evolved into much the same format, just like all supermarkets look pretty much the same, one not particicularly dissimilar from the next.
My guess is that blogs are not going to be the exception to the way things have always evolved historically. The most popular blogs will become monolithic and commercialized, evolving into internet versions of newspapers (a la Slashdot). Smaller blogs will briefly be the fad of the week, and then once people start realizing that it isn't worth the effort creating something that - chances are - isn't ever going to be read by millions they will go out of fashion. Sure, there have always been people who publish Christmas newsletters telling friends and family about events in their lives and who diligently write in their diaries. But this whole everyone-and-their-uncle-has-a-blog phenomenon we see today isn't likely to go on forever.
I know nothing about this thing, and have never even heard 'origami' and 'Microsoft' in the same sentence together before just now. But knowing how that M$ almost always uses totally unimaginative descriptors as product names, I'm guessing origami is something small that folds, like a portable device with a fold out screen or keyboard or something. I'm posting this guess purely for my own entertainment.
I may be a bit behind the times, but I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a shift away from lossy compression algorithms to lossless compression. As more and more of the market shifts away from the 650-700MB capacity constraint of traditional CDs, file sizes for songs are becoming less of an issue. As portable players get up to 60GB+ capacity, having files that are 6MB instead of 3MB starts to have less of an impact on people's ability to have the music they want at hand - since, if my math is correct, that's still enough memory for 10,000 songs. I mean, I don't personally know anyone who has more than a couple thousand songs - I'm sure there are people out there with much more - and that at least indicates that file size is not going to affect the average user that much.
Obviously there is room above lossless compression to improve quality - higher sample rates, multi-channel sound as this article says. Nevertheless, I'm just surprised there isn't more demand for audio that hasn't been poluted by compression.
It would be clearer to say that humans were not always apex predators. Many predators are themselves the prey of other creatures, and it is not exactly revolutionary to suggest that this may have been the case for humans and our proto-human ancestors for a long time.
I guess it's a matter of what people find easier and more efficient. I've always though of dictation as being easier and more efficient than typing, but I'm a pretty slow typist. In terms of an end-goal, machines will one day transcribe text directly from our thoughts. Seems like the steps toward that point begin with writing by hand, followed by typing, followed by dictation, but I suppose I could have the dictation and typing the wrong way around.
I think we will start to see more of an impact on literacy from the employment market in the coming years. One of the biggest things I hear employers complain about is that young hires can barely write a coherent sentence, and consequently can't be relied upon to compose text for important presentations, reports, and so on. Assuming grammar checking software that magically turns shite into gold doesn't materialize in the very near future, we may well see an emphasis on writing skills trickle down from the knowledge-worker market to universities, colleges, and high schools. Let's hope so, anyway.
Slang will change as technology changes. Right now there is a significant amount of pressure on users to economize their use of language. What else do you expect when trying to 'type' on a phone's keypad? But that will change when, for example, phones have voice recognition. Then different pressures will emerge.
Here's a dumb question from a non-lawyer: how long do patents last? Forever? I ask because if a patent only lasts 15 or 50 or 100 years or whatever, what sense does it make to patent something - even if it's essentially just an idea - if your protection is likely to expire before you take anything to market?
I live in the region (Oman, actually, which is much nicer than UAE), and while much of what you say about Dubai is correct, there are some finer points to be aware of that - at least in my opinion - make things even worse.
First, the labor problems apply only to unskilled expatriates from other countries who fail to uphold human rights as they apply to laborers: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Philippines, and Thailand are the primary culprits. Western expats, by contrast, can usually get assistance from their embassy or consolate if something goes seriously sour.
Second, the reason why things go sour is that many employers keep their employee's passports. Westerners can and usually do refuse to cooperate with this, especially Americans (for whom it is illegal to relinquish property of the US government to any foreign interest, as I understand it). Once your passport is in someone else's hands, you're pretty much stuck. I have a Swedish friend who got caught in a nasty bait-and-switch deal after giving over his passport, and who got next to no help from his consolate in the Emirates - he eventually had to be 'smuggled' out of UAE to Oman in order to take legal action to resolve things.
Third, it is very important to understand that 80% of the population of the UAE is expatriate. UAE citizens generally do not work. They are essentially absentee capitalists - owners of property and co-owners (known as 'sponsors') of foreign-owned businesses operating locally. Their guilt lies largely in their complicity with what is almost invariably Indian or Pakistani management in their companies. And Indian and Pakistani middle and upper management is, to a greater or lesser degree, controlled by the Indian and Pakistani mafias. The same 'system' is true for Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Iranian, Filippino, and other companies, but they are very much in the minority.
So it is important to realize that it is the mafia rackets who organize on the home country side to sucker these victimized laborers into going to UAE to work, and then trap them once they are there.
There are two underlying problems: the UAE government tolerates this crap, and the home countries do nothing to hold their citizens and/or businesses accountable overseas (No surrise on the second point, just think 'Nike', 'child labor', and 'sweatshops'). Often this is because the same rackets control their own corrupt governments as well.
International pressure has been quite successful in bringing the UAE in line. They have recently come under serious fire for labor conditions, and they have responded quickly in many instances with legislation and brutal penalities on companies in violation.
My recommendation is that if you are willing, help make a fuss and keep stories in the news ad public consciousness, because UAE is one of the few countries that actually responds to activism, protests, and international pressure. For example, in response to international outrage at the the abhorent practice of using children (usually foreign, some as young as 3 years old) as camel jockeys, the UAE responded by immediately banning the practice and requiring - no joke - robotic jockeys to be used instead. Check BBC for the story.
And just so happens to be the only country to use more energy and cause more environmental damage per capita than the good ole US of A.
I suppose it's no coincidence that the UAE also just so happens to have one of the few economies in the world that is soundly spanking the US's ass, again on a per-capita basis. And it's not all oil, though their labor practices are nothing to be proud of.
Larry Niven featured this concept in sci-fi in Ringworld (1970) - he called it 'Impact Armor' as I recall. Was he the first? Can anyone reference an earlier prediction of this technology?
You're right of course about how ACs work. But when I said boiler I was talking about the generator, which produces electricity by burning cow dung. Segway Boy's $100k gizmo is actually two devices together, like a washer and dryer - one is the vaporizer, one is the generator.
First off, nowhere did I advocate solar powered ACs as a means of generating water. As I mentioned, ACs have other working parts that draw a lot of power that this device would not require, such as powerful fans and a massive compressor. I agree that the notion of ACs as a source of water in the third world is retarded. In fact, I'd wager it's much clearer to me than you, seeing as I'm an anthropologist and have spent nearly 20 years living in developing countries.
Second, I said my window units, plural. My building has 4 running, and they do indeed generate 100+ liters per day - an average of around 25 each, and more than 50 each on very humid days.
Third, the reason why I know how much water they generate is because I collect that water and put it to use (unlike anyone else I know).
Fourth, I have not fully investigated the economics involved, but a quick search on froogle shows 1 sq m solar panels for less than $600 retail. A non-profit effort would obtain these panels at or close to cost - presumably less than half of that amount. Add in economies of scale for large numbers, and price is driven down further. My guess is $100/sq m is a conservative ceiling for the cost of the panels. Condensors are also cheap you can get a dehumidifier for about $150 retail. I therefore call major bullshit on your estimate of the cost of these devices at $2000. I think $500 is much more realistic.
As for your math, your total cost assumes one device per person - a preposterous assumption. 25 liters of drinking water per day could sustain 10 people. So at $500/unit and 10 people per unit, you could assist your hypothetical 100 million people for $5 billion - say $10 billion to include distribution. That is profoundly doable, considering we have recently spent over $150 billion bombing Iraq.
Lastly, regarding complexity, I think it is ridiculous to say that Segway Boy's system which includes two washing-machine-sized devices (one centrifuge water vaporizer/solids separator and one boiler-driven generator) are less complicated or lower maintenance than what is basically solar-powered dehumidifier.
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Which makes me wonder, why not have just one or two 'mother' ports and a peripheral that you can plug in to give yourself all the others you might need? Maybe that's what USB is supposed to be, but I look at my machine and USB doesn't seem very 'universal' to me. Video, sound, network and other stuff still on other ports. Is such a mother port impossible?
5 percent? No way. Porn accounts for way more than 5 percent of internet traffic...
But it's the missions that DO have good crossover that seem to me like they should be prioritized. And the best example I can think of are the missions to put up huge space telescopes to find a second Earth. Finding another Earth would be hugley inspiring, and as far as I understand it these scopes would be fantastic scientific instruments as well.
Am I the only one who was particularly sad to see these missions delayed?
WTF?
Of course, there is always the occassional flair of inspired creativity. I was in Asia recently and brought back a $5 'PolyStation' for a friend as a gag gift. It was a PS1 shell with about 500 NES roms built in - hilarious.
Whatever happened to 3D positional audio? Last I heard, Creative bought out Aureal and now we're stuck with EAX, which is pretty lousy as far as positional 3D audio goes. Aureal had full-on binaural algorithms in development, so that (at least with headphones on) a whisper over your shoulder really sounded like a whisper over your shoulder. Adding more speakers is a pretty hack solution compared to the elegant stuff that was, at least once upon a time, in the works.
Einstein had a few things to say along the same lines, for example, when we were developing nukes. There was also a good line in Jurassic Park that encapsulated this idea well, referring to recreating dinosaurs of course, that went something like, "just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should."
This idea is also at the center of the stem cell and cloning debates.
If Slashdot really is "news for nerds, stuff that matters," then we nerds should be intelligent enough to discuss technology in its full human context, not just on the lab table in our ivory towers of idealism and naivity. I think most of us here are smart enough not to have to bury our heads in the sand.
Constantine ... Jan Constantine ... a$$hole.
A better (as in more effective) approach would be to develop some characters and tell some funny little stories that actually have people compelled to see the next 'chapter' in the series. Infuriatingly catchy musical ditties are always a plus.
My guess is that blogs are not going to be the exception to the way things have always evolved historically. The most popular blogs will become monolithic and commercialized, evolving into internet versions of newspapers (a la Slashdot). Smaller blogs will briefly be the fad of the week, and then once people start realizing that it isn't worth the effort creating something that - chances are - isn't ever going to be read by millions they will go out of fashion. Sure, there have always been people who publish Christmas newsletters telling friends and family about events in their lives and who diligently write in their diaries. But this whole everyone-and-their-uncle-has-a-blog phenomenon we see today isn't likely to go on forever.
I know nothing about this thing, and have never even heard 'origami' and 'Microsoft' in the same sentence together before just now. But knowing how that M$ almost always uses totally unimaginative descriptors as product names, I'm guessing origami is something small that folds, like a portable device with a fold out screen or keyboard or something. I'm posting this guess purely for my own entertainment.
Obviously there is room above lossless compression to improve quality - higher sample rates, multi-channel sound as this article says. Nevertheless, I'm just surprised there isn't more demand for audio that hasn't been poluted by compression.
It would be clearer to say that humans were not always apex predators. Many predators are themselves the prey of other creatures, and it is not exactly revolutionary to suggest that this may have been the case for humans and our proto-human ancestors for a long time.
I guess it's a matter of what people find easier and more efficient. I've always though of dictation as being easier and more efficient than typing, but I'm a pretty slow typist. In terms of an end-goal, machines will one day transcribe text directly from our thoughts. Seems like the steps toward that point begin with writing by hand, followed by typing, followed by dictation, but I suppose I could have the dictation and typing the wrong way around.
I think we will start to see more of an impact on literacy from the employment market in the coming years. One of the biggest things I hear employers complain about is that young hires can barely write a coherent sentence, and consequently can't be relied upon to compose text for important presentations, reports, and so on. Assuming grammar checking software that magically turns shite into gold doesn't materialize in the very near future, we may well see an emphasis on writing skills trickle down from the knowledge-worker market to universities, colleges, and high schools. Let's hope so, anyway.
Well, I was thinking this guy's warp drive, for one.
Slang will change as technology changes. Right now there is a significant amount of pressure on users to economize their use of language. What else do you expect when trying to 'type' on a phone's keypad? But that will change when, for example, phones have voice recognition. Then different pressures will emerge.
Here's a dumb question from a non-lawyer: how long do patents last? Forever? I ask because if a patent only lasts 15 or 50 or 100 years or whatever, what sense does it make to patent something - even if it's essentially just an idea - if your protection is likely to expire before you take anything to market?
Wipe your nose junior, these are the big leagues.
Be sure to run that schpiel by the judge, next time you're in court and don't feel like calling him 'Your Honor'.
First, the labor problems apply only to unskilled expatriates from other countries who fail to uphold human rights as they apply to laborers: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Philippines, and Thailand are the primary culprits. Western expats, by contrast, can usually get assistance from their embassy or consolate if something goes seriously sour.
Second, the reason why things go sour is that many employers keep their employee's passports. Westerners can and usually do refuse to cooperate with this, especially Americans (for whom it is illegal to relinquish property of the US government to any foreign interest, as I understand it). Once your passport is in someone else's hands, you're pretty much stuck. I have a Swedish friend who got caught in a nasty bait-and-switch deal after giving over his passport, and who got next to no help from his consolate in the Emirates - he eventually had to be 'smuggled' out of UAE to Oman in order to take legal action to resolve things.
Third, it is very important to understand that 80% of the population of the UAE is expatriate. UAE citizens generally do not work. They are essentially absentee capitalists - owners of property and co-owners (known as 'sponsors') of foreign-owned businesses operating locally. Their guilt lies largely in their complicity with what is almost invariably Indian or Pakistani management in their companies. And Indian and Pakistani middle and upper management is, to a greater or lesser degree, controlled by the Indian and Pakistani mafias. The same 'system' is true for Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Iranian, Filippino, and other companies, but they are very much in the minority.
So it is important to realize that it is the mafia rackets who organize on the home country side to sucker these victimized laborers into going to UAE to work, and then trap them once they are there.
There are two underlying problems: the UAE government tolerates this crap, and the home countries do nothing to hold their citizens and/or businesses accountable overseas (No surrise on the second point, just think 'Nike', 'child labor', and 'sweatshops'). Often this is because the same rackets control their own corrupt governments as well.
International pressure has been quite successful in bringing the UAE in line. They have recently come under serious fire for labor conditions, and they have responded quickly in many instances with legislation and brutal penalities on companies in violation.
My recommendation is that if you are willing, help make a fuss and keep stories in the news ad public consciousness, because UAE is one of the few countries that actually responds to activism, protests, and international pressure. For example, in response to international outrage at the the abhorent practice of using children (usually foreign, some as young as 3 years old) as camel jockeys, the UAE responded by immediately banning the practice and requiring - no joke - robotic jockeys to be used instead. Check BBC for the story.
I suppose it's no coincidence that the UAE also just so happens to have one of the few economies in the world that is soundly spanking the US's ass, again on a per-capita basis. And it's not all oil, though their labor practices are nothing to be proud of.
Larry Niven featured this concept in sci-fi in Ringworld (1970) - he called it 'Impact Armor' as I recall. Was he the first? Can anyone reference an earlier prediction of this technology?
You're right of course about how ACs work. But when I said boiler I was talking about the generator, which produces electricity by burning cow dung. Segway Boy's $100k gizmo is actually two devices together, like a washer and dryer - one is the vaporizer, one is the generator.
Second, I said my window units, plural. My building has 4 running, and they do indeed generate 100+ liters per day - an average of around 25 each, and more than 50 each on very humid days.
Third, the reason why I know how much water they generate is because I collect that water and put it to use (unlike anyone else I know).
Fourth, I have not fully investigated the economics involved, but a quick search on froogle shows 1 sq m solar panels for less than $600 retail. A non-profit effort would obtain these panels at or close to cost - presumably less than half of that amount. Add in economies of scale for large numbers, and price is driven down further. My guess is $100/sq m is a conservative ceiling for the cost of the panels. Condensors are also cheap you can get a dehumidifier for about $150 retail. I therefore call major bullshit on your estimate of the cost of these devices at $2000. I think $500 is much more realistic.
As for your math, your total cost assumes one device per person - a preposterous assumption. 25 liters of drinking water per day could sustain 10 people. So at $500/unit and 10 people per unit, you could assist your hypothetical 100 million people for $5 billion - say $10 billion to include distribution. That is profoundly doable, considering we have recently spent over $150 billion bombing Iraq.
Lastly, regarding complexity, I think it is ridiculous to say that Segway Boy's system which includes two washing-machine-sized devices (one centrifuge water vaporizer/solids separator and one boiler-driven generator) are less complicated or lower maintenance than what is basically solar-powered dehumidifier.