Autozone will do a free computer scan on your car and print out the list of error codes for you to take to the mechanic/dealer.
It's a pretty nice service for them to provide considering it prevents you from being ripped off by some jackass mechanic ("Yeah, the computer box sez your framistat is kaput."), and also allows you to ignore minor issues like the check-engine light being on because your gas cap sensor is faulty.
Here's the problem I have with this guy's "explanation" on how the universe can be bigger than it is old. From the article:
Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."
I understand the concept that everything is getting further from everything else, not just the outer edge is getting further from the center, every point is moving away from every other point. But the question still remains: where did those other 999 light years stretch out into?
You can't tell me the rim of the universe moved 1 light year from the center, but the distance to the center from the rim has grown by 1000 light years, that makes no sense, the expanding universe inside the rim would have to pass the rim as it expanded.
For this to work then space - as in actual volume, or distance - would have to be being created (brought into existance from nothingness) not only at the "rim" of the universe, but in between every point as well. Which brings up an odd paradox of how can the universe be of a certain size, if at every moment that size increases not just by the expansion rate, but by an amount proportional to the total volume of the universe? Indeed technically (this is kind of a chicken-egg arguement) it is still only expanding at the rim and the "expansion" from inside instantaneously increases the size of the universe w/o physically pushing the rim out any faster.
I propose a different theory altogether, I'm not taking credit for this, and in fact I'm sure some observant slashdotter can point out what book cover it was that I read in B&N that I got this idea from, but I forget who it was by.
What if the speed of light changes, as in at the beginning of time, light was faster than it is now? That to me certainly makes a lot more sense than this nonsense about the universe expanding at the speed of light but somehow points inside of its boundary can move apart without "overflowing" the boundary.
The same as most cars on the morning commute now. To get one person from home to work. This does it cheaper and smaller.
Think if your company didn't have to buy that bigass parking lot along with the building? hmmm.....less operating overhead, more profits, maybe even a raise for you.
Like I said in my original post - what if instead of developing an electric vehicle that drives one person around, Toyota developed one that drove 20 people around? A solar/hydrogen powered commuter bus, instead of a personal vehicle.
I know it's not always feasible for a person to car pool or even use mass transit, but this concept car in particular is totally out of whack with any near-future scenario. This car assumes that energy will be so plentiful and cheap that this is a valid solution, which is not the case, nor will it be for decades barring some unforeseen fabulous energy storage/production advancement.
Additionally your idea that this car would allow a company to downsize its parking lot space doesn't take into account consumer choice - not everyone wants a transport pod, nor can everyone use one, a lot of the people commuting to work also have families who need to be picked up from school, the gym, daycare, etc. by this same commuter. So other commuters will still be driving their 4 person cars to the same parking lot. And it's not always feasible for someone to own a personal transport for work commuting and another for family travel - otherwise we'd probably see a lot more motorcyclists.
It's also a vehicle designed with class distinction in mind. Someone making minimum wage who needs to get to and from the mall for work isn't going to be driving one of these. Not because it may not be cheap enough, but because it's not versatile enough. Surely other similarly-priced vehicles would exist that would allow them to take laundry to the laundromat and even go out with a friend or two on the weekend.
And finally, the operating overhead of any non-mom-n-pop company is not significantly impacted by the cost of its parking lot. Any savings gained by cutting the parking size in half would be a negligible increase in salary when divided over the total number of employees.
I have a toyota prius. It's about the same price as a regular car. I get > 50 miles per gallon. It let's me haul stuff around.
Do you actually get >50 mpg, or are you just going by what the advertised mileage is? Because as discussed in numerous places (slashdot, NPR, too lazy to dig up links sorry) hybrid cars only get about 60 to 70% of the advertised mileage because of outdated EPA tests that give incorrect figures. And while it's about the same price as a regular car, it is a few thousand more. A lot of people do the math on the advertised mileage over the life of the car and figure they're making up for that price difference but the sad truth is they're really not.
My friend from college actually drives one and I've been in it. I have no problem with the prius or any hybrid car, I think it's a great concept and a step forward. Even if it doesn't get the advertised milage (my friend finds he gets about 38 mpg city) it's still better than any SUV and most every other car out there. I also agree that it's much, much roomier than it looks. So kudos to you for owning one, no sarcasm.
My general rant here is that this sort of concept car is a total waste of money and time, Toyota should be focusing on getting the Prius to actually get the mileage the EPA says it does, and in fact do better than that. I don't need to see a car that runs on batteries and carries only one person, I need to see a station wagon for a family of four that runs on gas, and not much of it. Why? because in America a lot of people need to carry around more than just themselves, and because gas is what we have right now. Fuel cells are in the works, hydrogen power too, but they're still a long ways off. Right now I think the however-many-tens of millions spent on this never-to-be-implemented concept car could have been better spent developing those technologies, or at least a more immediately feasible concept.
...the RIAA began legal filings to sue numerous users of an online news forum collectively known as "slashdotters" for copyright infringement of internal emails.
The emails, stored in a digital format known as PDF (which the RIAA maintains is yet another tool used exclusively by online hackers and pirates for the sole purpose of stealing IP), while not normally covered by copyright, were in this case earmarked by RIAA president Cary Sherman for use in his new book: Digital Stranglehold - a Step-by-Step Guide to Forcefully Prevent Any Exchange of Audio Information Whatsoever in the New Millenium - or - How to Ram the Buttplug of DRM Further up the American Consumer's Ass.
Brilliant, this is perfect. A vehicle that can only ever drive one person around. Obviously in Toyota's vision of the future there are unlimited energy reserves, it's cheap and widely available, and no one has any friends.
What is the point of a one person transport? There isn't even room for an appreciable amount of luggage. If this is only to be used for personal commuting with few to none personal items, say to and from the office, then this person should be using the hyper efficient and comforatble mass transit system in place in the future. Oh that's right, there won't be one because companies are still designing products like this for the highest level of society where privilege and money rule and fuck-all to the environment and anyone who can't afford a person transport pod.
I'm not a tree-hugging hippie, but this is redeiculous. How about this for a concept car - one that actually gets more than 50 miles per gallon - that addresses today's problems in the real world where people need to haul stuff and other people around on a budget and where energy is limited.
One of my mother's coworkers was having a lot of trouble trying to get her ancient (read Pentium I) computer updated and online so I did about 6 hours total work on the machine over the course of a few weeks in my spare time. I hooked her up with NetZero service and various other programs she wanted, and set the computer up for ease of use by an extremely amateur user. Despite her trying to pay me each time I was there, I only accepted sodas while I worked, insisting that it was such an easy job that that was all the compensation I needed.
A month or so before I moved into my first apartment she was moving out of her one-bedroom to live with her new fiance, and so in return for my work she called me up and gave me all the furniture from her old apartment provided I move it out.
I ended up getting a futon, couch, kitchen table and chairs, two clothes chests, a couple end tables, and a slew of kitchen stuff (plates, glasses, pots etc), all in excellent condition. She essentially totally furnished my new place and it cost me nothing.
I consider this to be the best example of good karma at work I've experienced to date.
Not to get into an argument on what is art, or start some pretentious troll, but as a work of art this thing sucks.
I mean seriously, she was given an interesting project (DNA representation) and certainly an original and interesting medium, and all we get is shopping carts welded to a stick-figure style double helix frame. It's boring and unimaginative as hell.
On the whole, yes it came out nice and it is engaging visually, but I feel like there could have been a lot more interesting variations on this. Perhaps build the helix itself out of carts, rather than just stick them on a prebuilt frame. Maybe use cables to create a self-supporting tension structure. Actually cut up some of the carts with a plasma torch and use the pieces to create individual molecules (G T C A) on the helix, there's lots of interesting structures to be built with the steel grids and wheels and legs, etc.
To me it seems like the end-result of this project was something that could have been built by any welder given the task "make a DNA helix from shopping carts." It was interpretted 100% literally by the artist and doesn't seem to convey any sense of insight, elaboration, or conceptual development.
Imagine if the wheel had been square when it was first invented. Everything would be terrible. Cars would shake themselves apart. Bicycles would kill their riders. But people would say "don't re-invent the wheel" and so you'd be stuck with it.
Funny, my bike and car with square wheels work perfectly fine on my saw-tooth shaped roads.
Perhaps it is not the box you must think outside of, grasshopper, but the Euclidean space that defines the concept of "box".
Short on cash for shorting :(
on
SCO Caught Copying
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
With each passing day and new SCO article I bemoan a total lack of cash to short the hell out of SCOX. Shit, if I'd started in January I'd be buying a new car this spring.
As to this infringement, I demand RIAA-style copyright sentencing. For each possible infringement SCO should have to pay the maximum fine, multiplied by the total possible number of people who had access to the material.
Given that it's posted online on a public site, and not in a limited user base network (ala p2p) this means the entire world population had access and SCO should be fined roughly the total value of all money produced in the world from 1972 to present.
If our justice system is going to let all these companies warp the law as they do it seems only fair they should fall prey to their own tactics.
Can anyone shed any light on this? Is is purely for making copies or does it allow for other decryption-requiring activities?
Certainly! As I understood the executive summary of the bill, it covers what your average slashdotter would consider "fair use" i.e. making backups but also converting the media to another format or decrypting it for personal use.
There is a well-worded form letter that you can fill out and have emailed or faxed to your US Representative urging them to support the bill. (Automated too so you just enter your address and it sends it to the right Rep.) The entire text of the bill itself is available here.
in order to pay their bills without carrying around bulky items such as credit cards.
Thank god, finally someone has come up with a way to save me from the unbearable burden of hauling my friggin credit card from place to place.[/Sarcasm]
Now, if a credit card is too bulky for your outfit then you should have some of my sex... with me.
No, I'm pretty sure Apple will ignore this. The company would love for the RIAA to pull the plug on iTunes.
Where in the world did you get the idea that Apple wants iTunes shut down?
1. RIAA pulls the plug on iTunes
2. Apple (and therefore everyone else) no longer sells AAC encoded music
3. No one needs an iPod to play AAC files
4. iPod sales drop
5. Apple looses its lucrative music hardware market
iTunes and the iPod are intimately linked, kill one and the other will fester. Apple knows this and, despite currently getting the shaft on music file sales, will continue to support and protect iTunes and the FairPlay standard to maintain iPod's market.
Not sure if you're being serious or not but I'll bite. Put the dangly bit in the cup of advanced tea substitute. Oh, and don't ever spill or drop the fake tea, cuz the nutrimat won't give you another and you'll have to restart from before you dropped it.
So has anyone figured out the deal with allofmp3.com since it was posted on slashdot a little over a week ago?
It's one of those sounds-too-good-to-be-true deals: Pay only for bandwidth (resonable $$ too)
Choose your encoding format
Choose your encoding bitrate
I think the unlisted "feature" here is likely 'Fund the Russian mafia' but it's hard to tell from the site alone how legitimate it is, what their real distribution rights are, and if artists are even recieving money from them.
Any slashdotters have experiences or insight on this service? I know someone must because we/.'d it in about 10 minutes after the article went up.
And who built the polling machines?
on
Evoting in the News
·
· Score: 2, Funny
How much do you want to bet that the poll was taken using the evoting machines in question?
[Sarcasm] Yeah, those numbers are totally reliable and will definitely reflect the average American opinion. [/Sarcasm]
--(I should probably warn people this is a spoiler)-- I spent hours playing this game, it was annoyingly frustrating at points. There is no way I would have gotten through it without using the hints guide. I was able to figure out putting together the improbability drive, solve each of the scenarios, and I knew enough to collect everything I found in the game.
But seriously, how in hell were you supposed to figure out to plant all the fluffs in the damn pot to grow a plant???
And talk about an anticlimactic ending. After so many hours of typing obscenities into the game engine out of absolute frustration, you finally complete it and there was absolutely zero reward, not even a joke from D.A. (except for the one on the player I guess).
"The Sasser worm attacks confirm our prediction that mass worm attacks against the multiple vulnerabilities disclosed by Microsoft on April 13 were likely,"
Predicting that multiple recently announced security flaws in windows will be exploited is like predicting the sun won't explode tomorrow.
I doubt very much these phone cans will be always on, more likely when you press the button to make the call it also turns on the device so simply waiving an EMF detecting device around a coke display probably won't work.
Still, the phone inside will be conductive, and in fact have an antenna of some sort to transmit the signal. A basic metal detector should be able to distinguish between an empty aluminum can and one containing a gps phone because of the differrence in inductance. Waiving around a beach-sized metal detector might not be such a good idea but it's not too hard to build your own hand-held unit.
Unfortunately this approach would require you to pretty much scan an entire display up close. Anyone with more knowledge of gps and cell phones have an idea of how to detect the components even when they're powered down?
You know what we'll need then? Magnets. BIG fucking magnets.
This is another misconception that people have of nanotechnology, the machines = made of metal idea. True nanotechnology would be machines on the nano scale, i.e. sizes ranging from protein up to cells. When you're "building" at that scale you're free to use any atoms you like, and a mechanical system does not have to be made of metal. In fact, for machines that intereact with molecules, metal atoms are often the worst choice for building materials. Protein is a machine, DNA is a machine, they both perform preprogrammed functions that amount to more than just chemical reactions, they move and manipulate molecules in ways we would consider robotic, and yet if you put a big magnet up to my skin you won't be sucking all the DNA out of it.
Or EMF. Or microwaves. Or X-Rays.
As to the idea of using magnets or radiation to cleanse people or an area of nanites, it's more complicated than just dousing an area with some form of radiation. The scale of the nanites is the first problem, they won't necessarily be sitting on the surface of things, they can be inside the molecular structure of people, buildings, the earth's surface, etc; making them very hard to find and reach. Additionally while a blast of x-rays or microwaves would in most cases totally erradicate any nanites in an area, the radiation will most likely kill or injure any macro biological life forms as well, i.e. you, me, and our dog sparky. EMF just plain won't work because, once again, while these are in fact machines, they are not machines in the large-scale sense that we are used to, they have no electronics to short-circuit.
And if even one escapes, on a mote of dust in the wind perhaps, it will simply begin to multiply again as soon as that mote lands.
Bob McCannon's statement that "the correlations between violent media and aggression are stronger than between smoking and lung cancer"
Ah but the difference here is correlation is not causation, as the media seems to need to be reminded of time and time again. Sure there are some unstable few who see violence in media and emulate it, but there is quite often strong evidence that there was more wrong with those people than just their choices of movies, games and music.
There's a huge leap between pressing buttons on a controller while watching a TV screen and actually going out and purchasing weapons and using them on people in the real world. A leap that any stable-to-begin-with person is not going to make, there are just too many times along the way where they are going to realize that what they're doing is wrong.
People gravitate towards what interests them, violent people play violent games, that's all there is to it. This doesn't mean all people who play violent games are violent, and vice versa, (all generalizations are false, etc etc) but someone who ends up going out and stealing a car and running over pets and people to play real life GTA is most likely going to be someone who had the choice to buy GTA or Tetris and chose the former because that kind of media is what interested them before they even bought their game system.
I say bring it on. The consequences will sort themselves out as they always have upon previous technology.
The problem here is all previous technologies put together are not as powerful as molecular assemblers would be.
You make an excellent point in that most of the world's problems today revolve around scarcity or perceived scarcity. So what happens when a technology that allows us to create anything out of raw materials - including the means to automate finding/supplying those raw materials - removes all scarcity?
This is something we need to plan for because it is a change so radical that nothing like it has ever happened before, nor as fast. Once we can create food from dirt, cars from rubble, clean drinking water from sludge there is the potential to alleviate all basic human needs. And the step beyond that is to create any object at all from raw materials, making scarcity all but disappear. Humanity and society has always organized itself around supply and demand, but this technology will turn that system on its head.
There is the potential for great good, but this type of change will be so overwhelming and so utterly foreign to society that it may cause more chaos than good. Plus in order to disseminate the technology to everyone, and to use it towards saving lives, rather than turning people into piles of component atoms, is an undertaking so huge that with no preset plans or structure we may end up making the world worse instead of a utopia. Imagine if this technology becomes the sole property of some megalithic corporation, or dominating and dictatorial government. Sure you can get anything you want and it's dirt cheap to produce, but MegaCorp will charge you a hefty fee after running every non-nanotech company out of business, or the Big Brother government that has molecular eyes and ears everywhere and wields the ultimate weapon of molecular deconstruction. These are worst-case scenarios to be sure, but a little planning now could prevent any variation of them.
Getting back to the social and philosophical consequences of humanity making the world into a garden of eden where everything is provided, no doubt we will find new ways and reasons to destroy each other. Holy wars might spiral out of control and consume entire nations since now that no one needs to spend time farming or working, and they have all the material goods they want, the only thing left to fight over is their beliefs. If a nation goes to war for resources or power it will stop when it has won those things, if a nation goes to war over religious or philosophical beliefs and has unlimited resources it will never stop until its enemies are either enslaved or erradicated.
We must plan for this technology and the change it will bring, for it will be the most transformative force humanity has seen since the harnessing of fire.
Re:Energy requirements, among other things...
on
Diamond Age Approaching?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Molecular scale assemblers breaking and forming bonds under modest energy requirements are nothing new, that's the kind of thing that proteins and enzymes do in your body every day. More established and qualified researchers, such as Drexler and Smalley, actually address some of these issues. One of the ways to use less energy, or to acquire energy from bond breaking and forming is to utilize the geometry of the action. Twisting motions and catalytic molecules can actually allow these types of actions to occur by balancing energy use rather than storing and expending it in huge one-way reactions. (think of a flywheel keeping a wheel spinning allowing you to add and subtract small amounts of energy to change its speed VS filling up a gas tank with gas to burn away later and toss away the excess energy as heat and friction.)
Just because this article by two less-knowledgable nanotechnology advocates doesn't cover all the bases doesn't mean there aren't some really intelligent people out there working to solve these problems even now.
but please can the gloom-n-doom because the world isn't going to end just because we made really small machines. *grumble*
Ever heard of the grey goo apocalypse scenario? The idea is that nanites would disassemble the entire planet and turn every useful atom into more assemblers, leaving it an orbiting ball of seething assemblers. Granted it sounds far fetched, but if we were to actually create molecular assemblers with the ability to self replicate and they got out of our contorl there would be few ways to stop them.
These tiny machines you underestimate are essentially viruses that do not target particular cells or hosts or use different biological channels to spread. They are non-selective omnivours that diassemble any molecules they can use and reconstruct them into copies of themselves, ad infinitum.
I doubt that we'll produce a molecular assembler in only 20 years, maybe by then we'll have an understanding of precisely how to do it. And most sci-fi books completely overestimate or just plain exaggerate how fast such nanites would spread. The fact remains, however, that once they do start to spread it will be almost impossible to destroy 100% of them and they will become a constant plague on this planet at the very least.
This is the one weapon that can actually undo everything, and it only takes a single rogue assembler to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a pretty nice service for them to provide considering it prevents you from being ripped off by some jackass mechanic ("Yeah, the computer box sez your framistat is kaput."), and also allows you to ignore minor issues like the check-engine light being on because your gas cap sensor is faulty.
Or, was that just me
I think that was just you, the rest of the slashdotters broke out res edit and just switched the order of images displayed. ;)
Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."
I understand the concept that everything is getting further from everything else, not just the outer edge is getting further from the center, every point is moving away from every other point. But the question still remains: where did those other 999 light years stretch out into?
You can't tell me the rim of the universe moved 1 light year from the center, but the distance to the center from the rim has grown by 1000 light years, that makes no sense, the expanding universe inside the rim would have to pass the rim as it expanded.
For this to work then space - as in actual volume, or distance - would have to be being created (brought into existance from nothingness) not only at the "rim" of the universe, but in between every point as well. Which brings up an odd paradox of how can the universe be of a certain size, if at every moment that size increases not just by the expansion rate, but by an amount proportional to the total volume of the universe? Indeed technically (this is kind of a chicken-egg arguement) it is still only expanding at the rim and the "expansion" from inside instantaneously increases the size of the universe w/o physically pushing the rim out any faster.
I propose a different theory altogether, I'm not taking credit for this, and in fact I'm sure some observant slashdotter can point out what book cover it was that I read in B&N that I got this idea from, but I forget who it was by.
What if the speed of light changes, as in at the beginning of time, light was faster than it is now? That to me certainly makes a lot more sense than this nonsense about the universe expanding at the speed of light but somehow points inside of its boundary can move apart without "overflowing" the boundary.
The same as most cars on the morning commute now. To get one person from home to work. This does it cheaper and smaller.
Think if your company didn't have to buy that bigass parking lot along with the building? hmmm.....less operating overhead, more profits, maybe even a raise for you.
Like I said in my original post - what if instead of developing an electric vehicle that drives one person around, Toyota developed one that drove 20 people around? A solar/hydrogen powered commuter bus, instead of a personal vehicle.
I know it's not always feasible for a person to car pool or even use mass transit, but this concept car in particular is totally out of whack with any near-future scenario. This car assumes that energy will be so plentiful and cheap that this is a valid solution, which is not the case, nor will it be for decades barring some unforeseen fabulous energy storage/production advancement.
Additionally your idea that this car would allow a company to downsize its parking lot space doesn't take into account consumer choice - not everyone wants a transport pod, nor can everyone use one, a lot of the people commuting to work also have families who need to be picked up from school, the gym, daycare, etc. by this same commuter. So other commuters will still be driving their 4 person cars to the same parking lot. And it's not always feasible for someone to own a personal transport for work commuting and another for family travel - otherwise we'd probably see a lot more motorcyclists.
It's also a vehicle designed with class distinction in mind. Someone making minimum wage who needs to get to and from the mall for work isn't going to be driving one of these. Not because it may not be cheap enough, but because it's not versatile enough. Surely other similarly-priced vehicles would exist that would allow them to take laundry to the laundromat and even go out with a friend or two on the weekend.
And finally, the operating overhead of any non-mom-n-pop company is not significantly impacted by the cost of its parking lot. Any savings gained by cutting the parking size in half would be a negligible increase in salary when divided over the total number of employees.
Do you actually get >50 mpg, or are you just going by what the advertised mileage is? Because as discussed in numerous places (slashdot, NPR, too lazy to dig up links sorry) hybrid cars only get about 60 to 70% of the advertised mileage because of outdated EPA tests that give incorrect figures.
And while it's about the same price as a regular car, it is a few thousand more. A lot of people do the math on the advertised mileage over the life of the car and figure they're making up for that price difference but the sad truth is they're really not.
My friend from college actually drives one and I've been in it. I have no problem with the prius or any hybrid car, I think it's a great concept and a step forward. Even if it doesn't get the advertised milage (my friend finds he gets about 38 mpg city) it's still better than any SUV and most every other car out there. I also agree that it's much, much roomier than it looks. So kudos to you for owning one, no sarcasm.
My general rant here is that this sort of concept car is a total waste of money and time, Toyota should be focusing on getting the Prius to actually get the mileage the EPA says it does, and in fact do better than that. I don't need to see a car that runs on batteries and carries only one person, I need to see a station wagon for a family of four that runs on gas, and not much of it. Why? because in America a lot of people need to carry around more than just themselves, and because gas is what we have right now. Fuel cells are in the works, hydrogen power too, but they're still a long ways off. Right now I think the however-many-tens of millions spent on this never-to-be-implemented concept car could have been better spent developing those technologies, or at least a more immediately feasible concept.
The emails, stored in a digital format known as PDF (which the RIAA maintains is yet another tool used exclusively by online hackers and pirates for the sole purpose of stealing IP), while not normally covered by copyright, were in this case earmarked by RIAA president Cary Sherman for use in his new book: Digital Stranglehold - a Step-by-Step Guide to Forcefully Prevent Any Exchange of Audio Information Whatsoever in the New Millenium - or - How to Ram the Buttplug of DRM Further up the American Consumer's Ass.
What is the point of a one person transport? There isn't even room for an appreciable amount of luggage. If this is only to be used for personal commuting with few to none personal items, say to and from the office, then this person should be using the hyper efficient and comforatble mass transit system in place in the future. Oh that's right, there won't be one because companies are still designing products like this for the highest level of society where privilege and money rule and fuck-all to the environment and anyone who can't afford a person transport pod.
I'm not a tree-hugging hippie, but this is redeiculous. How about this for a concept car - one that actually gets more than 50 miles per gallon - that addresses today's problems in the real world where people need to haul stuff and other people around on a budget and where energy is limited.
A month or so before I moved into my first apartment she was moving out of her one-bedroom to live with her new fiance, and so in return for my work she called me up and gave me all the furniture from her old apartment provided I move it out.
I ended up getting a futon, couch, kitchen table and chairs, two clothes chests, a couple end tables, and a slew of kitchen stuff (plates, glasses, pots etc), all in excellent condition. She essentially totally furnished my new place and it cost me nothing.
I consider this to be the best example of good karma at work I've experienced to date.
I mean seriously, she was given an interesting project (DNA representation) and certainly an original and interesting medium, and all we get is shopping carts welded to a stick-figure style double helix frame. It's boring and unimaginative as hell.
On the whole, yes it came out nice and it is engaging visually, but I feel like there could have been a lot more interesting variations on this. Perhaps build the helix itself out of carts, rather than just stick them on a prebuilt frame. Maybe use cables to create a self-supporting tension structure. Actually cut up some of the carts with a plasma torch and use the pieces to create individual molecules (G T C A) on the helix, there's lots of interesting structures to be built with the steel grids and wheels and legs, etc.
To me it seems like the end-result of this project was something that could have been built by any welder given the task "make a DNA helix from shopping carts." It was interpretted 100% literally by the artist and doesn't seem to convey any sense of insight, elaboration, or conceptual development.
Funny, my bike and car with square wheels work perfectly fine on my saw-tooth shaped roads.
Perhaps it is not the box you must think outside of, grasshopper, but the Euclidean space that defines the concept of "box".
As to this infringement, I demand RIAA-style copyright sentencing. For each possible infringement SCO should have to pay the maximum fine, multiplied by the total possible number of people who had access to the material. Given that it's posted online on a public site, and not in a limited user base network (ala p2p) this means the entire world population had access and SCO should be fined roughly the total value of all money produced in the world from 1972 to present.
If our justice system is going to let all these companies warp the law as they do it seems only fair they should fall prey to their own tactics.
Certainly! As I understood the executive summary of the bill, it covers what your average slashdotter would consider "fair use" i.e. making backups but also converting the media to another format or decrypting it for personal use.
There is a well-worded form letter that you can fill out and have emailed or faxed to your US Representative urging them to support the bill. (Automated too so you just enter your address and it sends it to the right Rep.) The entire text of the bill itself is available here.
Thank god, finally someone has come up with a way to save me from the unbearable burden of hauling my friggin credit card from place to place.[/Sarcasm]
Now, if a credit card is too bulky for your outfit then you should have some of my sex... with me.
Where in the world did you get the idea that Apple wants iTunes shut down?
1. RIAA pulls the plug on iTunes
2. Apple (and therefore everyone else) no longer sells AAC encoded music
3. No one needs an iPod to play AAC files
4. iPod sales drop
5. Apple looses its lucrative music hardware market
iTunes and the iPod are intimately linked, kill one and the other will fester. Apple knows this and, despite currently getting the shaft on music file sales, will continue to support and protect iTunes and the FairPlay standard to maintain iPod's market.
Not sure if you're being serious or not but I'll bite. Put the dangly bit in the cup of advanced tea substitute. Oh, and don't ever spill or drop the fake tea, cuz the nutrimat won't give you another and you'll have to restart from before you dropped it.
In fact, it's probably easiest if I just add a link to the online walkthru.
It's one of those sounds-too-good-to-be-true deals:
Pay only for bandwidth (resonable $$ too)
Choose your encoding format
Choose your encoding bitrate
I think the unlisted "feature" here is likely 'Fund the Russian mafia' but it's hard to tell from the site alone how legitimate it is, what their real distribution rights are, and if artists are even recieving money from them.
Any slashdotters have experiences or insight on this service? I know someone must because we /.'d it in about 10 minutes after the article went up.
[Sarcasm] Yeah, those numbers are totally reliable and will definitely reflect the average American opinion. [/Sarcasm]
I spent hours playing this game, it was annoyingly frustrating at points. There is no way I would have gotten through it without using the hints guide. I was able to figure out putting together the improbability drive, solve each of the scenarios, and I knew enough to collect everything I found in the game.
But seriously, how in hell were you supposed to figure out to plant all the fluffs in the damn pot to grow a plant???
And talk about an anticlimactic ending. After so many hours of typing obscenities into the game engine out of absolute frustration, you finally complete it and there was absolutely zero reward, not even a joke from D.A. (except for the one on the player I guess).
Predicting that multiple recently announced security flaws in windows will be exploited is like predicting the sun won't explode tomorrow.
Still, the phone inside will be conductive, and in fact have an antenna of some sort to transmit the signal. A basic metal detector should be able to distinguish between an empty aluminum can and one containing a gps phone because of the differrence in inductance. Waiving around a beach-sized metal detector might not be such a good idea but it's not too hard to build your own hand-held unit.
Unfortunately this approach would require you to pretty much scan an entire display up close. Anyone with more knowledge of gps and cell phones have an idea of how to detect the components even when they're powered down?
This is another misconception that people have of nanotechnology, the machines = made of metal idea. True nanotechnology would be machines on the nano scale, i.e. sizes ranging from protein up to cells. When you're "building" at that scale you're free to use any atoms you like, and a mechanical system does not have to be made of metal. In fact, for machines that intereact with molecules, metal atoms are often the worst choice for building materials. Protein is a machine, DNA is a machine, they both perform preprogrammed functions that amount to more than just chemical reactions, they move and manipulate molecules in ways we would consider robotic, and yet if you put a big magnet up to my skin you won't be sucking all the DNA out of it.
Or EMF. Or microwaves. Or X-Rays.
As to the idea of using magnets or radiation to cleanse people or an area of nanites, it's more complicated than just dousing an area with some form of radiation. The scale of the nanites is the first problem, they won't necessarily be sitting on the surface of things, they can be inside the molecular structure of people, buildings, the earth's surface, etc; making them very hard to find and reach. Additionally while a blast of x-rays or microwaves would in most cases totally erradicate any nanites in an area, the radiation will most likely kill or injure any macro biological life forms as well, i.e. you, me, and our dog sparky. EMF just plain won't work because, once again, while these are in fact machines, they are not machines in the large-scale sense that we are used to, they have no electronics to short-circuit.
And if even one escapes, on a mote of dust in the wind perhaps, it will simply begin to multiply again as soon as that mote lands.
Ah but the difference here is correlation is not causation, as the media seems to need to be reminded of time and time again. Sure there are some unstable few who see violence in media and emulate it, but there is quite often strong evidence that there was more wrong with those people than just their choices of movies, games and music.
There's a huge leap between pressing buttons on a controller while watching a TV screen and actually going out and purchasing weapons and using them on people in the real world. A leap that any stable-to-begin-with person is not going to make, there are just too many times along the way where they are going to realize that what they're doing is wrong.
People gravitate towards what interests them, violent people play violent games, that's all there is to it. This doesn't mean all people who play violent games are violent, and vice versa, (all generalizations are false, etc etc) but someone who ends up going out and stealing a car and running over pets and people to play real life GTA is most likely going to be someone who had the choice to buy GTA or Tetris and chose the former because that kind of media is what interested them before they even bought their game system.
The problem here is all previous technologies put together are not as powerful as molecular assemblers would be.
You make an excellent point in that most of the world's problems today revolve around scarcity or perceived scarcity. So what happens when a technology that allows us to create anything out of raw materials - including the means to automate finding/supplying those raw materials - removes all scarcity?
This is something we need to plan for because it is a change so radical that nothing like it has ever happened before, nor as fast.
Once we can create food from dirt, cars from rubble, clean drinking water from sludge there is the potential to alleviate all basic human needs. And the step beyond that is to create any object at all from raw materials, making scarcity all but disappear. Humanity and society has always organized itself around supply and demand, but this technology will turn that system on its head.
There is the potential for great good, but this type of change will be so overwhelming and so utterly foreign to society that it may cause more chaos than good. Plus in order to disseminate the technology to everyone, and to use it towards saving lives, rather than turning people into piles of component atoms, is an undertaking so huge that with no preset plans or structure we may end up making the world worse instead of a utopia.
Imagine if this technology becomes the sole property of some megalithic corporation, or dominating and dictatorial government. Sure you can get anything you want and it's dirt cheap to produce, but MegaCorp will charge you a hefty fee after running every non-nanotech company out of business, or the Big Brother government that has molecular eyes and ears everywhere and wields the ultimate weapon of molecular deconstruction. These are worst-case scenarios to be sure, but a little planning now could prevent any variation of them.
Getting back to the social and philosophical consequences of humanity making the world into a garden of eden where everything is provided, no doubt we will find new ways and reasons to destroy each other. Holy wars might spiral out of control and consume entire nations since now that no one needs to spend time farming or working, and they have all the material goods they want, the only thing left to fight over is their beliefs.
If a nation goes to war for resources or power it will stop when it has won those things, if a nation goes to war over religious or philosophical beliefs and has unlimited resources it will never stop until its enemies are either enslaved or erradicated.
We must plan for this technology and the change it will bring, for it will be the most transformative force humanity has seen since the harnessing of fire.
Just because this article by two less-knowledgable nanotechnology advocates doesn't cover all the bases doesn't mean there aren't some really intelligent people out there working to solve these problems even now.
Ever heard of the grey goo apocalypse scenario? The idea is that nanites would disassemble the entire planet and turn every useful atom into more assemblers, leaving it an orbiting ball of seething assemblers. Granted it sounds far fetched, but if we were to actually create molecular assemblers with the ability to self replicate and they got out of our contorl there would be few ways to stop them.
These tiny machines you underestimate are essentially viruses that do not target particular cells or hosts or use different biological channels to spread. They are non-selective omnivours that diassemble any molecules they can use and reconstruct them into copies of themselves, ad infinitum.
I doubt that we'll produce a molecular assembler in only 20 years, maybe by then we'll have an understanding of precisely how to do it. And most sci-fi books completely overestimate or just plain exaggerate how fast such nanites would spread. The fact remains, however, that once they do start to spread it will be almost impossible to destroy 100% of them and they will become a constant plague on this planet at the very least.
This is the one weapon that can actually undo everything, and it only takes a single rogue assembler to do it.