Tyrell: What can he do for you?
Roy: Can the maker repair what he makes?
Tyrell: Would you like to be modified?
Roy: I had in mind something a little more radical.
Tyrell: What seems to be the problem?
Roy: Death.
Tyrell: Death. Well, I'm afraid that's a little out of my jurisdiction, you...
Roy: I want more life, fucker.
Tyrell: The facts of life: To make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once its been established.
Roy: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship sinks.
Roy: What about EMS recombination?
Tyrell: We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate is an alkylating agent and a potent mutagen. It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.
Roy: Then a repressor protein that blocks the operating cells?
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries the mutation and you've got a virus again... but, all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Roy: But not to last.
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly, Roy. Look at you, you're the prodigal son, you're quite a prize!
Roy: I've done questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraordinary things, revel in your time!
Roy: Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for?
IIRC, there's somewhere between 100 billion and 500 billion galaxies. So, let's split the difference and say there is 200 billion galaxies. Now these guys say that 200,000 have the same or very close to same axis direction. That's 1 out of a million. Divide the sky up into 1 million directions. Now, 200,000 of them all point in one of those directions, and the other 199,999,800,000 are in the other 999,999 directions. OK. divide 199,999,800,000 by 999,999 and we get 200,000 galaxies aligned in every other of the million directions. Now, if there are MORE than 200 billion galaxies, (and there may well be) the numbers grow for that. and I would like to see just how accurately they can plot the axis of some far flung galaxy - can they get it down to 1/1millionth of the sky?
Now if these 200,000 galaxies are all in a particular region of the universe, THAT would be explosive news, but, unless I completely misread the article, this isn't the case.
As it is, I think the news is interesting, but I find it less than compelling.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
RISE UP PEOPLE!!!! QUIT YOUR JOB FOR SLACK!!! STOP WORKING - you're never going to be "rich" so SCREW THE BASTARDS! Sabotage the workplace!!! STOP WORKING! You only make it worse by co-operating!
Apple makes really beautiful and very well built computers that come bundled with lots of useful software. Now that they run Intel, they can run windows as well. Their laptops are expensive, but they are extremely well equipped. I'm suprised they don't sell MORE of them than they do. I'd take a MacBook Pro over DellBoxen any day of the week.
Suffice it to say, many of the things you Observe are correct, but your interpretations and the plans based on them are quite suspect.
but you don't say which.
Then:
What you base your interpretations and action plans on is verifiable fact. This gives you false confidence that you're right when combined with the consensus of the people you associate with.
Well, what would you have me base my plans in? WISHFUL THINKING? Read the above articles. If you still disagree, then a: you really don't get it, and b: at least when you're starving in some transit camp in Colorado, you can't say you weren't properly warned.
"'Defendants cannot be expected, let alone ordered to violate another nation's laws,'
Nope. Wouldn't want to do that. Herding Jews into gas chambers? Nuh uh - not gonna do anything to stop that. Starving minority populations? Nope. Couldn't possibly be involved with anything that would get in the way of that. No no no - we don't want to grow a conscience - that's bad for business!
You don't know anything about me. I happen to be DEEPLY involved with "The Problem" and spend much of my waking life working at pulling us away from the precipice. Unfortunately, I am continually faced with presumptuous no-nothings such as yourself who are not only willfully ignorant of the facts, but actively avoiding any consciousness (much less responsibility) of changing their lives in such a way as to help ameliorate the situation for their own health and safety as well as that of their children and their descendants.
You want the facts? Go find out how global per capita energy peaked in the 1980s, and how the ineluctable and unavoidable facts of thermodynamics and the foibles of human nature are colluding to completely reshape civilisation as we know it and basically reduce the population by 90% within a few hundred years. IF the likes of your prevail, we will be left in a state not much better off than the superstitious know-nothings of the medieval period and slowly slink back to a permanent neolithic condition and die-off. IF me and my cohorts are able to affect the change we are advocating, there might (but perhaps not) be a thriving (if depopulated) future for humanity living a comfortable and colourful existence for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years, permitting human exitinction to occur as we gradually evolve into some other kind of creature.
When you've finished reading that entire site (it will take a few months - I know - I've read the entire site) get back to me.
The next time you decide to spew, please think twice - of course, in your case, once would be a dramatic improvement.
1. Will have lived most of their lives in economic recession.
2. Will ride bicycles and electric trikes - cars are too expensive.
3. Will not be able to afford air travel, which will be largely the province of the super rich and the military.
4. Will grow some fraction of their own food.
5. Will be lucky to attend university.
6. Will mostly graduate from trade schools in maintenance (plumbing, HVAC, cabinetry, ensolarisation projects, or agriculture.
7. Will remember several small limited local nuclear wars, and know or know someone who knows someone who died in them.
8. Will hate their parents and grandparents for being such an idiotic bunch of uniformed greedheads.
9. Will bear the brunt of the Powerdown.
10. Will know or know someone who knows someone in the refugee transit camps in eastern Oregon and southern Idaho.
11. Will be trying to figure out a way to move north, or northwest, where it's cooler.
12. Will consider gay marriage as normal as any other kind of marriage, because marriage is a matter of metaphysics, and government doesn't care about that - gov't cares about contracts and property.
13. Will look back at the Bush administration as a complete and utter failure, and those who voted for Bush as complicit in his war crimes, as the German People were complicit in WW2 and the Holocaust.
14. Will realise that technology is not energy, and will know how to calculate Energy Return on Energy Invested in their heads, much as the class of 1976 was able to calculate grams of coke vs. ounces of colombian pot...
15. Will know how to darn their own socks.
16. Will remember the internet as the predecessor of what became "transparent" and they simply see it as "media".
17. Will laugh at Kurzweil for being such a tool, as machine intelligence is STILL 30 years off.
18. Will know that fusion is still 20 years away, just like it was 20 years ago.
19. Will help tear up the broad asphalt streets to be replaced with narrow cobblestone.
20. Will raze their grandparent's McMansions because they were build like crap, and the land is more useful as farm land.
21. Will live in cities or in small towns clustered near railroad depots.
22. Will eat organic food because there isn't enough natural gas left for fertiliser and pesticides anyway.
23. Will know how to stoke a wood fire in the morning to warm the house in winter and get a pot of tea boiling.
24. Will change their outer clothing less often, but change their under clothing every day. The outer clothing will be more strongly built and durable. They will repair their own underwear.
25. will find digital media will not exist - it's all digital, so "digital" media has no meaning.
26. Will be able to procure all of the films of Warner Brothers (or any other film company), including cartoons, on a single deeply encrypted drive.
27. Will be able to procure a drive that contains every song ever released by a given music company.
28. Will the depth of media daunting and much of it will be ignored.
29. Fine Art will finally be completely digested and shat out by the entertainment industry as simple entertainment for the educated. Some will argue this had already happened by 1995...
30. Will find The Long Emergency in full swing. Billions dying off in Africa and Asia, millions perishing in Europe and North America as the human species loses its fight against Mother Nature and the laws of thermodynamics.
When the government does it, it usually means that you have no other (legal) choice but to accept the censored version. When a non-government entity does it, it's their choice and there is almost always an alternative. Yes it may not be as cheap or convenient, but there is still ways for you to get your censor-free music. It's not "bad" when Wal-Mart does it, it's their choice. Just like it's your choice not to shop there.
Walmart is well known for gutting towns of their small businesses. It is not uncommon for WalMart to be the only record store for miles. So, sure: you can buy from OTHER online places, but if you want the real deal on a CD, then you may or may not have much access or selection thanks to their procurement policies, esp. if you have no interest/access to online shopping. ***I agree that one can shop elsewhere*** (I do) but I also realise that some people in some parts of the USA don't have quite so many options - it is often a choice between Walmart, Kmart, Sears, RiteAid Drugs, and Safeway. Not a lot of culture there...
Yeah, so CONTENTIOUSLY that someone picked up my obvious point that Sony has a long long history of dead end technologies, and that criticising Sony for Just That Point in the context of this story makes an obvious and insightful reference to said technologies, so much so that the guy who DID get my point was rated "Interesting"?
BluRay, please meet betamax. I'm sure you'll get along just fine...
RS
Another good video site: fora.tv
on
YouTube for Science?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I think these online video sites are great, and the specialisation/professionalisation of the genre only makes sense as the field matures.
One of my faves is fora.tv which has lots of really good lectures and readings. A lot of it is from CSPAN, but I like CSPAN, so I'm not one to complain.
This kind of refinement in the online video space is a great great thing, and as online advertising increases in value (At the expense of broadcast advertising dollars) these kinds of websites will have greater and greater viability and from there, increased depth of programming.
Some websites have tried to do this in an entertainment sphere, and for the most part, aren't realy doing too well - audience expectations are high and the material presented is often iffy in quality. OF course, that changing, slowly - better stuff is arriving, but there needs to be filtering systems. Things like the site in TFA and fora.tv are just such filters.
This is a very exciting time for online video!
Now, if we can only keep the bandwidth up before it all chokes itself to death...
until I changed my mind and as I typed my scathing flammage of the Germans, I was able to turn on my microwave photon gun and correct my email to a glowing review of these brilliant scientists who have clearly figured out a way to live outside the laws of physics.
And now I turn off my microwave photon gun set to "drippy irony".
So, 13 light years would be 76,427,000,000,000 miles.
Now divide that by 30,000 years and we get 2,547,566,666.667 miles. now there are 8,760 hours in a year, so if we divide 2,547,566,666.667 by 8,760, we get 290,818.113 miles per hour. Now, that IS fast, especially given the average asteroid skips along at 40,000 mph. But it's not THAT fast - it would take that star an hour to go from here to the moon. If it did it in 5 minutes - yeah, that's fast. But an hour? Heck - our feeble crappy spacecraft get there in a few days...
I mean, it's not like they're doing anything. I'm wondering if it is just a bunch of lawyers and vultures sitting around in veal fattening pens collecting pay checks.
Certainly, they all know they're now in a major death spiral. All they can do is slowly lay off people as more and more of it sinks below the waters into the briny deep of history.
This proves that science works. It doesn't "disprove" (global warming). What it does is gives us more refined data, and a clearer understanding of the climate.
Obviously, dumping billions of tons of Greenhouse Gases into the atmosphere is not a good idea, period. However, this refined data shows the warming trend in a more accurate light, and that is all to the good.
I see this as (yet another) great victory of the scientific method, and in this case, aided by a sharp-eyed blogger. The beauty and strength of scientific truth lies in its "weakness": its provisionality - things are only true until proven otherwise.
a monopoly is a monopoly, as much as a dictator is a dictator. There might be a benevolent dictator, as with Adobe. But a dictator is a dictator, and a monopoly is a monopoly. You don't have to be evil to be a monopoly. you simply have to have an overwhelming and dominant position in a given segment of a market. So, MS is a monopoly. Yes, there are competitors (OSX, Linux, etc.) but they are more of a token opposition that only supports the fact that MS is a monopoly.
Adobe is also a monopoly. There are other apps, but they don't have the market penetration and dominance that Adobe does.
And: Adobe isn't that nice, either - They can be REAL dicks when it comes to educational licensing, and, in fact, it is their dominance in the education market that has led to their dominance in other areas as people will use what they learn, and the graphics industry is notoriously "tradition" bound as it has a sense of "craft" going back centuries.
I teach in an art school, so I know these things. The grip that Adobe has on design schools borders on criminal. If Adobe stopped supporting OSX, it would crush Apple. Computers are just commodities, and are much cheaper than software... So, the BIG thing to worry about is MS buying Adobe. That would be a Very Bad Thing...
In fact, I think Apple should look into buying Adobe... for self preservation, if nothing else.
Slashdot Mirror
RS
RS
Roy: Can the maker repair what he makes?
Tyrell: Would you like to be modified?
Roy: I had in mind something a little more radical.
Tyrell: What seems to be the problem?
Roy: Death.
Tyrell: Death. Well, I'm afraid that's a little out of my jurisdiction, you...
Roy: I want more life, fucker.
Tyrell: The facts of life: To make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once its been established.
Roy: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship sinks.
Roy: What about EMS recombination?
Tyrell: We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate is an alkylating agent and a potent mutagen. It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.
Roy: Then a repressor protein that blocks the operating cells?
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries the mutation and you've got a virus again... but, all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Roy: But not to last.
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly, Roy. Look at you, you're the prodigal son, you're quite a prize!
Roy: I've done questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraordinary things, revel in your time!
Roy: Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for?
RS
cheers.
RS
Now if these 200,000 galaxies are all in a particular region of the universe, THAT would be explosive news, but, unless I completely misread the article, this isn't the case.
As it is, I think the news is interesting, but I find it less than compelling.
RS
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
RISE UP PEOPLE!!!! QUIT YOUR JOB FOR SLACK!!! STOP WORKING - you're never going to be "rich" so SCREW THE BASTARDS! Sabotage the workplace!!! STOP WORKING! You only make it worse by co-operating!
RS
RS
RS
Firm conjecture:
http://www.dieoff.org/page15.htm http://www.dieoff.org/page112.htm http://www.dieoff.org/page224.htm
Science:
http://www.dieoff.org/page140.htm http://www.dieoff.org/page178.htm http://www.dieoff.org/page170.htm http://www.dieoff.org/page199.htm
You say:
Suffice it to say, many of the things you Observe are correct, but your interpretations and the plans based on them are quite suspect.
but you don't say which.
Then:
What you base your interpretations and action plans on is verifiable fact. This gives you false confidence that you're right when combined with the consensus of the people you associate with.
Well, what would you have me base my plans in? WISHFUL THINKING? Read the above articles. If you still disagree, then a: you really don't get it, and b: at least when you're starving in some transit camp in Colorado, you can't say you weren't properly warned.
RS
Nope. Wouldn't want to do that. Herding Jews into gas chambers? Nuh uh - not gonna do anything to stop that. Starving minority populations? Nope. Couldn't possibly be involved with anything that would get in the way of that. No no no - we don't want to grow a conscience - that's bad for business!
RS
http://www.dieoff.org
RS
You want the facts? Go find out how global per capita energy peaked in the 1980s, and how the ineluctable and unavoidable facts of thermodynamics and the foibles of human nature are colluding to completely reshape civilisation as we know it and basically reduce the population by 90% within a few hundred years. IF the likes of your prevail, we will be left in a state not much better off than the superstitious know-nothings of the medieval period and slowly slink back to a permanent neolithic condition and die-off. IF me and my cohorts are able to affect the change we are advocating, there might (but perhaps not) be a thriving (if depopulated) future for humanity living a comfortable and colourful existence for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years, permitting human exitinction to occur as we gradually evolve into some other kind of creature.
When you've finished reading that entire site (it will take a few months - I know - I've read the entire site) get back to me.
The next time you decide to spew, please think twice - of course, in your case, once would be a dramatic improvement.
RS
2. Will ride bicycles and electric trikes - cars are too expensive.
3. Will not be able to afford air travel, which will be largely the province of the super rich and the military.
4. Will grow some fraction of their own food.
5. Will be lucky to attend university.
6. Will mostly graduate from trade schools in maintenance (plumbing, HVAC, cabinetry, ensolarisation projects, or agriculture.
7. Will remember several small limited local nuclear wars, and know or know someone who knows someone who died in them.
8. Will hate their parents and grandparents for being such an idiotic bunch of uniformed greedheads.
9. Will bear the brunt of the Powerdown.
10. Will know or know someone who knows someone in the refugee transit camps in eastern Oregon and southern Idaho.
11. Will be trying to figure out a way to move north, or northwest, where it's cooler.
12. Will consider gay marriage as normal as any other kind of marriage, because marriage is a matter of metaphysics, and government doesn't care about that - gov't cares about contracts and property.
13. Will look back at the Bush administration as a complete and utter failure, and those who voted for Bush as complicit in his war crimes, as the German People were complicit in WW2 and the Holocaust.
14. Will realise that technology is not energy, and will know how to calculate Energy Return on Energy Invested in their heads, much as the class of 1976 was able to calculate grams of coke vs. ounces of colombian pot...
15. Will know how to darn their own socks.
16. Will remember the internet as the predecessor of what became "transparent" and they simply see it as "media". 17. Will laugh at Kurzweil for being such a tool, as machine intelligence is STILL 30 years off.
18. Will know that fusion is still 20 years away, just like it was 20 years ago.
19. Will help tear up the broad asphalt streets to be replaced with narrow cobblestone.
20. Will raze their grandparent's McMansions because they were build like crap, and the land is more useful as farm land.
21. Will live in cities or in small towns clustered near railroad depots.
22. Will eat organic food because there isn't enough natural gas left for fertiliser and pesticides anyway.
23. Will know how to stoke a wood fire in the morning to warm the house in winter and get a pot of tea boiling.
24. Will change their outer clothing less often, but change their under clothing every day. The outer clothing will be more strongly built and durable. They will repair their own underwear.
25. will find digital media will not exist - it's all digital, so "digital" media has no meaning.
26. Will be able to procure all of the films of Warner Brothers (or any other film company), including cartoons, on a single deeply encrypted drive.
27. Will be able to procure a drive that contains every song ever released by a given music company.
28. Will the depth of media daunting and much of it will be ignored.
29. Fine Art will finally be completely digested and shat out by the entertainment industry as simple entertainment for the educated. Some will argue this had already happened by 1995...
30. Will find The Long Emergency in full swing. Billions dying off in Africa and Asia, millions perishing in Europe and North America as the human species loses its fight against Mother Nature and the laws of thermodynamics.
RS
Walmart is well known for gutting towns of their small businesses. It is not uncommon for WalMart to be the only record store for miles. So, sure: you can buy from OTHER online places, but if you want the real deal on a CD, then you may or may not have much access or selection thanks to their procurement policies, esp. if you have no interest/access to online shopping. ***I agree that one can shop elsewhere*** (I do) but I also realise that some people in some parts of the USA don't have quite so many options - it is often a choice between Walmart, Kmart, Sears, RiteAid Drugs, and Safeway. Not a lot of culture there...
RS
Whatever.
RS
But you have a point. Sony doesn't have a great history of making formats that eventually become the standard.
Thanks for noticing, and I agree! Obviously pinheaded slashdot mods don't agree, as I was denigrated to Troll status on this one. Morons.
*sigh*
RS
RS
One of my faves is fora.tv which has lots of really good lectures and readings. A lot of it is from CSPAN, but I like CSPAN, so I'm not one to complain.
This kind of refinement in the online video space is a great great thing, and as online advertising increases in value (At the expense of broadcast advertising dollars) these kinds of websites will have greater and greater viability and from there, increased depth of programming.
Some websites have tried to do this in an entertainment sphere, and for the most part, aren't realy doing too well - audience expectations are high and the material presented is often iffy in quality. OF course, that changing, slowly - better stuff is arriving, but there needs to be filtering systems. Things like the site in TFA and fora.tv are just such filters.
This is a very exciting time for online video!
Now, if we can only keep the bandwidth up before it all chokes itself to death...
RS
Let's just hope they don't get swamped with false positives.
Lets hope they DO get swamped with false positives and stop with this nonsense. Damn. What a bunch of fascist crap.
RS
And now I turn off my microwave photon gun set to "drippy irony".
RS
or EVIL!!!
RS
Mira is traveling faster than a speeding bullet, and has a tail that's 13 light-years long and over 30,000 years old.
Hrrrmmm. OK. So, a light year is about 5,879,000,000,000 miles.
So, 13 light years would be 76,427,000,000,000 miles.
Now divide that by 30,000 years and we get 2,547,566,666.667 miles. now there are 8,760 hours in a year, so if we divide 2,547,566,666.667 by 8,760, we get 290,818.113 miles per hour. Now, that IS fast, especially given the average asteroid skips along at 40,000 mph. But it's not THAT fast - it would take that star an hour to go from here to the moon. If it did it in 5 minutes - yeah, that's fast. But an hour? Heck - our feeble crappy spacecraft get there in a few days...
RS
Certainly, they all know they're now in a major death spiral. All they can do is slowly lay off people as more and more of it sinks below the waters into the briny deep of history.
RS
Obviously, dumping billions of tons of Greenhouse Gases into the atmosphere is not a good idea, period. However, this refined data shows the warming trend in a more accurate light, and that is all to the good.
I see this as (yet another) great victory of the scientific method, and in this case, aided by a sharp-eyed blogger. The beauty and strength of scientific truth lies in its "weakness": its provisionality - things are only true until proven otherwise.
This is very good news.
RS
Adobe is also a monopoly. There are other apps, but they don't have the market penetration and dominance that Adobe does.
And: Adobe isn't that nice, either - They can be REAL dicks when it comes to educational licensing, and, in fact, it is their dominance in the education market that has led to their dominance in other areas as people will use what they learn, and the graphics industry is notoriously "tradition" bound as it has a sense of "craft" going back centuries.
I teach in an art school, so I know these things. The grip that Adobe has on design schools borders on criminal. If Adobe stopped supporting OSX, it would crush Apple. Computers are just commodities, and are much cheaper than software... So, the BIG thing to worry about is MS buying Adobe. That would be a Very Bad Thing...
In fact, I think Apple should look into buying Adobe... for self preservation, if nothing else.
cheers,
RS