Could you please record some and mail them to me. It just happens that I don't have access to American TV right now, which is a shame.
But anyway, I don't see why people should be prevented from buying uncertified products from abroud themselves. Nobody expects the American government to protect people from a product effectively bought in Germany.
Does the current situation mean that the American government guarantees you that your car will be safe? Will it pay you if you have an accident? Will it reimburse the repairs and your hospital bill? What's the real point of this certification then?
And also how screwed the US bureacracy is. I don't think this issue is that important. It would be much better for everyone (taxpayers, the economy, everyone) if the custom official just took 10 grands (like they do it in "more corrupt" countries) and let them import the car compared with spending hundreds of thousands on lobbists and lawyers with ultimately the same result.
Most of the Ford employees are not office workers. They don't use the operating environment to copy files, launch applications, surf WWW or check e-mail. They use a full-screen applications that would look almost the same on Windows and on Linux (though the interface would not look the same pixel-for-pixel). It won't make any difference for them.
RIAA will end peer-to-peer as an acronym. To illustrate the point, do you really think a filesharing program called Distributed Massively Cooperative Application would be very popular among slashdotters?
After a black PR campaign financed by record labels: P2P == child porn* P2P == terrorism* P2P == Un-American* P2P == Un-Christian* P2P == communism*
suddenly you no longer can get a research grant for P2P processing of climate data.
* Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Re:ynlo gcramblins eht tirsf dna tasl setterl
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
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· Score: 1
Dna tusj eikl tosm eeoplp, I olsa thought that uoy erotw eholw sordw sackwardb tirsf. Tub fi eht dorw starts dna snde hitw eht eams rettel, st'i a gib yiveawag.
And while we are at it, thank you NASA for inventing fire, the wheel, alphabet, pottery and everything else. And Russia is the origin of elephants.:)
NASA does a lot of useful research, that's kind of obvious and not really hard if you get billions of dollars in funding. The efficiency, on the other hand, is a lot more difficult to achieve.
Anyway, the point that I wanted to make was that space should not be our top priority. You didn't disprove it. NASA has R&D capacity and it developed some useful things - let them develop more technologies that are actually useful. Rename them into NURDA (useful reseach & development) if you wish.:)
Now to less important points. 1) Fibre optics are not the end-it-all technology, but it certainly looks much more feasible and capable to me than satellites. Just look at the costs. You can build a USA-wide fibre network (no last mile of course) for the price of 10 satellites (rough estimates). 2) What don't you like about fusion? It's not finished yet, but again it looks much more feasible than building giant solar plants in orbit and beaming power back to surface or other crazy ideas. 3) The last time I checked, there have been no warheads falling onto US. But now that you mention it, I certainly think that another arms race (this time in space) would be really cool. And how about building some military bases in Antactic, while we are at it?
then they would certainly rise to the top. Their search engine is by far head and shoulders above the rest. It is fast and efficient. However, I am not sure of two things.
You don't need a powerful search technology to find Madonna's MP3. Google's competence lies in providing relevant results to very wide range of general queries. You don't need this to only search for movies and music files which are more or less clearly labeled.
But how urgent is it? We will definitely have nanotechnologies and smarter-than-us AI in less than 100 years, may be as soon as in a few decades. It would be piece of cake to build thousands of space elevators then in just a year. With controlled fusion we will fly all over the Solar System in a few years more. What is exactly the point of trying to do all this with modern primitive tech?
Tell me, do you think there would be any reason to send Columbus to India in his if Isabella could expect the technology to build atomic air carriers in ten years?
You remind me of Russian government that included "trolleybus lines by 2050" in its plan for Grozny (capital of Chechnya) reconstruction. Yeah, that's important, sure.
Prevention of environmental disaster - what we have already is more than enough. It's not like there is a shortage of LEO satellites and if we want more, our present technology is good and cheap enough.
Creating a global network for modern communications, entertainment and networking - fibre-optics are much better, unless you are talking about Internet in the middle of the ocean. Still, as long as we are moslty an urban society, fibre is the way to go.
Global education and health services - satellites might be a useful temporarily solution (to provide Internet access in remote regions), but ultimately fibre is again the way to go. It's cheap and has more than enough capacity.
Cheap and environmentally friendly energy - fusion is much more feasible than any space based projects.
Transportation safety - GPS is useful, but it's not like it needs any addtional stimuli. There will also be a competing European system soon (Galileo?) and there is a Russian one already (Glonas?).
Emergency warning and recovery systems - mostly hogwash. The capacity for taking pretty pictures from space already exists. What we need are scientific advances in applied sciences (geology, climatology, etc.) to analyse these pictures.
National defense and strategic security - it's not like the ability to kill more people is such a compelling reason. Not for me, certainly.
Protection against catastrophic planetary accidents - it's not urgent. It would be a smarter decision to invest more money in nanotech and AI and then get into space in a couple of years with these new capabilities.
Creation of new jobs and industries - we don't need new jobs, we need to eliminate existing ones. That's why nanotech and AI are important. And if you still want jobs, just open some widget-making factories.
A new vision for the 21st century and a mandate to explore truly new frontiers - a completely outdated vision from 20th century. Flying into space will not change anything. Mars is beyond our reach, unless we get really important advanced technologies - nanotech and AI. To truly open new frontiers for us, we need to oncentrate on these, not on useless space launches.
Incidentally Usama managed to do what Bush insincerely claimed was the goal of the terrorists - to steal the freedoms from Americans that he so much hated.:) Of course, he wouldn't be able to do it without his faithful confederates in the US - Ashcroft, Bush and others.:(
And, more importantly, it seems to me that current pathogens can't really kill that many people. The governments really are quite effective in stopping epidemics. Since terrorists are unlikely to design new biological weapons (if they can, then this whole subject of restricting research is moot), they can just take the pathogens and dump them somewhere (or infect someone and walk around people, etc.). Even in the best case (for terrorists) I seriously doubt it would be comparable with 9/11. And even on 9/11, the goal was to kill tens of thousands, if, of course, the towers were brought down by terrorists, which we have many reasons to doubt.
So while the threat of bubonic plague in NY water system might be really sexy for a newspaper report, I don't think this is a real problem. After all, how many people were killed with anfrax letters? Wouldn't it be easier to just hire some thugs from inner city and kill them with baseball bats?
Present your results to the memebers of a classified US military project that helps us to fight the terrorists. This is the best option. You get your research read by the people who really matter. This isn't stupid. This is simply idiotic. Most of the so called "controversial reasearch" is about creating cures for known deseases, not developing biological weapons. I can't see any reason whatsoever why the papers shouldn't be presented to other researchers and doctors first.
There is a very simple reason why you should not hinder the work of such scientists with security-related hurdles in any way. The reason is that if some scientists can still have access to dangerous pathogens, a terrorist mastermind with millions of dollars in cash bent on destruction of the freedom Americans enjoy (pardon the lame joke) certainly can too. The only way to prevent Usama from getting some plague bacteria is to make it impossible for anyone to have any kind of work related to it. Do you want it?
And very is an important perception issue. Most of the scientists working with these "bioweapons" are actually developing drugs and vaccines for the deseases, not developing biological weapons. That's why doing something like limiting circulation of their papers to FBI officials (like some idiot suggested in this discussion) is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard about this topic.
I recommend a short story by Gregory Benford called "Topological journey" or smth. like this (I've read a Russian translation). It borrows heavily from superstring ideas and is quite cool, even though it doesn't adhere strictly to the real science.
It might be a bad response, I don't know...:) When reading articles, I usually filter out the crap on the subconscious level and measure the quality of text by how much is left.:) Oakley has one interesting (though highly speculative) idea and this makes his response worth reading. The idea is that people start feeling the change and prefer stories about change. I agree (and I said that in the parent post) that there are many new technologies worthy of stories, but may be they are relatively less important now. 50 years ago writers and readers could ignore the transition phase and simply write about the future. Now we feel the world changing and simply can't ignore it. So the problems of transformations become more important and we see an increase in stories about it and a relative decrease in stories about the future per se.
This may not be entirely correct, but still it's an idea worth considering.
May be people are scared of the real future. They were comfortable with the old ideas like flying cars and mechanical slaves (more of the same, but shinier), but today (or today's tomorrow) is a whole different story. Like they say in ideologically wrong genre. "The world is changing. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air.":) What was fun to dream about 30 years ago is scary now that the change is just behind the corner. Capitalism is going to be abandoned soon. Real world abandoned for virtual reality. Material posessions and emotions abandoned for pursuit for knowlede. Humanness abandoned for rationality of merged human-AI mind. Death for immortality.
People generally don't like change. Especially the change happening to them. Since they usually can do nothing at all to stop it, they choose to ignore it.
My young sister is even a bit uncomfortable with the idea of large cheap high-quality displays being widely available in 10 years or so. It breaks her understanding of the world, where plasma displays are an indicators of someone's status. The changes may be wonderful, but they are scary because they are close. That might be the reason sci-fi is no longer popular.
I think Mark Oakley is quite right. At least his ideas look believable. We switch from sci-fi describing technologies to sci-fi and fantasy describing revolutionary social change, because that's what we are going to see.
Still, I think not enough attention is (and was) paid to the technological side of things. There simply wasn't enough sci-fi describing the reality (not the fiction) of modern technologies, such as genomics, nanotechnology, AI, etc. Yes, there is much more certainty now, but that doesn't mean the need for sci-fi went away. We can't use 50-year old "blueprints" (like Childhood's End) to explain how technology would work to people, because now we know better.
So I still don't see the answer. Why hard sci-fi becomes less popular (and this isn't an American phenomenon, this happens in other countries too and is discussed there as well).
I disagree. What is needed is a basic 3D-enable flat desktop. Basically a capable engine where you can do something as simple as place 3D objects (icons, but 3D) on a flat surface. Add to that the ability to move windows back and forth (add depth). Now you have something which is as functional as traditional desktop, but (if you add enough effects) looks extremely cool.
When you make this functional solution available, people can start experimenting with it. Soon working solutions that are more 3D will evolve. We don't know exactly what should be done, that's why we should proceed in small steps.
Another impotant thing is controls. Mouse is simply not good enough, unless you create an intelligent cursor and the desktop itself that would provide for extremely context-sensitive actions.
I think the problem is the idiot programmers don't know how to code, not 3D per se. I had the same problems with their BridgeBuilder with GeForce4 Ti4200. On highest quality settings it runs at 10 fucking fps. Does it look a lot better than Doom3? Nope, it fucking doesn't.
Fortunately, my eyes just ignored the bullshit in this article and it wasn't even passed to my visual cortex.:) But thanks for the rebuttal, hopefully this will help some readers.
Sure, action movies have no quick and jerky movies whatsover and the only reason Wachowsky brothers introduced the sol-mo effects, was to work around the limitations of the human eye.
The truth is that TV programs and movies are filmed WITH motion blur. That means that every frame (for films) is made during 1/24th of a second. It's actualy a superposition of all the trillions of images that were projected to the camera during that time. Our eye gets all the light that was destined for it, the only thing that we lose is a bit of temporal resolution - we don't know what happened in the beginning of the frame and what in the end - it's all blurred. In computer games every frame is in fact a moment in time, not a superposition of moments. That's why 24 fps is not enough for a game (although many people can play at such fps, some can't, while 24fps in movies is generally ok for everyone). Addition motion blur would help, but the trick is that calculating motion blur for 3D games is almost as computationally intensive, as just upping the fps rate, since you need to calculate all frames anyway in order to superimpose them.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you please record some and mail them to me. It just happens that I don't have access to American TV right now, which is a shame.
But anyway, I don't see why people should be prevented from buying uncertified products from abroud themselves. Nobody expects the American government to protect people from a product effectively bought in Germany.
It seems that Bill was finally able to solve this problem.
Does the current situation mean that the American government guarantees you that your car will be safe? Will it pay you if you have an accident? Will it reimburse the repairs and your hospital bill? What's the real point of this certification then?
And also how screwed the US bureacracy is. I don't think this issue is that important. It would be much better for everyone (taxpayers, the economy, everyone) if the custom official just took 10 grands (like they do it in "more corrupt" countries) and let them import the car compared with spending hundreds of thousands on lobbists and lawyers with ultimately the same result.
Just like BMW
Most of the Ford employees are not office workers. They don't use the operating environment to copy files, launch applications, surf WWW or check e-mail. They use a full-screen applications that would look almost the same on Windows and on Linux (though the interface would not look the same pixel-for-pixel). It won't make any difference for them.
RIAA will end peer-to-peer as an acronym. To illustrate the point, do you really think a filesharing program called Distributed Massively Cooperative Application would be very popular among slashdotters?
After a black PR campaign financed by record labels:
P2P == child porn*
P2P == terrorism*
P2P == Un-American*
P2P == Un-Christian*
P2P == communism*
suddenly you no longer can get a research grant for P2P processing of climate data.
* Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Dna tusj eikl tosm eeoplp, I olsa thought that uoy erotw eholw sordw sackwardb tirsf. Tub fi eht dorw starts dna snde hitw eht eams rettel, st'i a gib yiveawag.
A______y, I d__t t___k t__t we n__d m____e l_____s at a_l. I w_s a__e to r__d b__h p___s j__t f__e.
If you work in the company where 10% of people are regularly raped by members of the opposing sex, yes, I think separation would be a good solution.
And while we are at it, thank you NASA for inventing fire, the wheel, alphabet, pottery and everything else. And Russia is the origin of elephants. :)
:)
NASA does a lot of useful research, that's kind of obvious and not really hard if you get billions of dollars in funding. The efficiency, on the other hand, is a lot more difficult to achieve.
Anyway, the point that I wanted to make was that space should not be our top priority. You didn't disprove it. NASA has R&D capacity and it developed some useful things - let them develop more technologies that are actually useful. Rename them into NURDA (useful reseach & development) if you wish.
Now to less important points.
1) Fibre optics are not the end-it-all technology, but it certainly looks much more feasible and capable to me than satellites. Just look at the costs. You can build a USA-wide fibre network (no last mile of course) for the price of 10 satellites (rough estimates).
2) What don't you like about fusion? It's not finished yet, but again it looks much more feasible than building giant solar plants in orbit and beaming power back to surface or other crazy ideas.
3) The last time I checked, there have been no warheads falling onto US. But now that you mention it, I certainly think that another arms race (this time in space) would be really cool. And how about building some military bases in Antactic, while we are at it?
then they would certainly rise to the top. Their search engine is by far head and shoulders above the rest. It is fast and efficient. However, I am not sure of two things.
You don't need a powerful search technology to find Madonna's MP3. Google's competence lies in providing relevant results to very wide range of general queries. You don't need this to only search for movies and music files which are more or less clearly labeled.
But how urgent is it? We will definitely have nanotechnologies and smarter-than-us AI in less than 100 years, may be as soon as in a few decades. It would be piece of cake to build thousands of space elevators then in just a year. With controlled fusion we will fly all over the Solar System in a few years more. What is exactly the point of trying to do all this with modern primitive tech?
Tell me, do you think there would be any reason to send Columbus to India in his if Isabella could expect the technology to build atomic air carriers in ten years?
You remind me of Russian government that included "trolleybus lines by 2050" in its plan for Grozny (capital of Chechnya) reconstruction. Yeah, that's important, sure.
Let's see. 10 reasons, right?
Prevention of environmental disaster - what we have already is more than enough. It's not like there is a shortage of LEO satellites and if we want more, our present technology is good and cheap enough.
Creating a global network for modern communications, entertainment and networking - fibre-optics are much better, unless you are talking about Internet in the middle of the ocean. Still, as long as we are moslty an urban society, fibre is the way to go.
Global education and health services - satellites might be a useful temporarily solution (to provide Internet access in remote regions), but ultimately fibre is again the way to go. It's cheap and has more than enough capacity.
Cheap and environmentally friendly energy - fusion is much more feasible than any space based projects.
Transportation safety - GPS is useful, but it's not like it needs any addtional stimuli. There will also be a competing European system soon (Galileo?) and there is a Russian one already (Glonas?).
Emergency warning and recovery systems - mostly hogwash. The capacity for taking pretty pictures from space already exists. What we need are scientific advances in applied sciences (geology, climatology, etc.) to analyse these pictures.
National defense and strategic security - it's not like the ability to kill more people is such a compelling reason. Not for me, certainly.
Protection against catastrophic planetary accidents - it's not urgent. It would be a smarter decision to invest more money in nanotech and AI and then get into space in a couple of years with these new capabilities.
Creation of new jobs and industries - we don't need new jobs, we need to eliminate existing ones. That's why nanotech and AI are important. And if you still want jobs, just open some widget-making factories.
A new vision for the 21st century and a mandate to explore truly new frontiers - a completely outdated vision from 20th century. Flying into space will not change anything. Mars is beyond our reach, unless we get really important advanced technologies - nanotech and AI. To truly open new frontiers for us, we need to oncentrate on these, not on useless space launches.
Incidentally Usama managed to do what Bush insincerely claimed was the goal of the terrorists - to steal the freedoms from Americans that he so much hated. :) Of course, he wouldn't be able to do it without his faithful confederates in the US - Ashcroft, Bush and others. :(
And, more importantly, it seems to me that current pathogens can't really kill that many people. The governments really are quite effective in stopping epidemics. Since terrorists are unlikely to design new biological weapons (if they can, then this whole subject of restricting research is moot), they can just take the pathogens and dump them somewhere (or infect someone and walk around people, etc.). Even in the best case (for terrorists) I seriously doubt it would be comparable with 9/11. And even on 9/11, the goal was to kill tens of thousands, if, of course, the towers were brought down by terrorists, which we have many reasons to doubt.
So while the threat of bubonic plague in NY water system might be really sexy for a newspaper report, I don't think this is a real problem. After all, how many people were killed with anfrax letters? Wouldn't it be easier to just hire some thugs from inner city and kill them with baseball bats?
Present your results to the memebers of a classified US military project that helps us to fight the terrorists. This is the best option. You get your research read by the people who really matter.
This isn't stupid. This is simply idiotic. Most of the so called "controversial reasearch" is about creating cures for known deseases, not developing biological weapons. I can't see any reason whatsoever why the papers shouldn't be presented to other researchers and doctors first.
There is a very simple reason why you should not hinder the work of such scientists with security-related hurdles in any way. The reason is that if some scientists can still have access to dangerous pathogens, a terrorist mastermind with millions of dollars in cash bent on destruction of the freedom Americans enjoy (pardon the lame joke) certainly can too. The only way to prevent Usama from getting some plague bacteria is to make it impossible for anyone to have any kind of work related to it. Do you want it?
And very is an important perception issue. Most of the scientists working with these "bioweapons" are actually developing drugs and vaccines for the deseases, not developing biological weapons. That's why doing something like limiting circulation of their papers to FBI officials (like some idiot suggested in this discussion) is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard about this topic.
I recommend a short story by Gregory Benford called "Topological journey" or smth. like this (I've read a Russian translation). It borrows heavily from superstring ideas and is quite cool, even though it doesn't adhere strictly to the real science.
:) When reading articles, I usually filter out the crap on the subconscious level and measure the quality of text by how much is left. :) Oakley has one interesting (though highly speculative) idea and this makes his response worth reading. The idea is that people start feeling the change and prefer stories about change. I agree (and I said that in the parent post) that there are many new technologies worthy of stories, but may be they are relatively less important now. 50 years ago writers and readers could ignore the transition phase and simply write about the future. Now we feel the world changing and simply can't ignore it. So the problems of transformations become more important and we see an increase in stories about it and a relative decrease in stories about the future per se.
It might be a bad response, I don't know...
This may not be entirely correct, but still it's an idea worth considering.
May be people are scared of the real future. They were comfortable with the old ideas like flying cars and mechanical slaves (more of the same, but shinier), but today (or today's tomorrow) is a whole different story. Like they say in ideologically wrong genre. "The world is changing. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air." :) What was fun to dream about 30 years ago is scary now that the change is just behind the corner. Capitalism is going to be abandoned soon. Real world abandoned for virtual reality. Material posessions and emotions abandoned for pursuit for knowlede. Humanness abandoned for rationality of merged human-AI mind. Death for immortality.
People generally don't like change. Especially the change happening to them. Since they usually can do nothing at all to stop it, they choose to ignore it.
My young sister is even a bit uncomfortable with the idea of large cheap high-quality displays being widely available in 10 years or so. It breaks her understanding of the world, where plasma displays are an indicators of someone's status. The changes may be wonderful, but they are scary because they are close. That might be the reason sci-fi is no longer popular.
I think Mark Oakley is quite right. At least his ideas look believable. We switch from sci-fi describing technologies to sci-fi and fantasy describing revolutionary social change, because that's what we are going to see.
Still, I think not enough attention is (and was) paid to the technological side of things. There simply wasn't enough sci-fi describing the reality (not the fiction) of modern technologies, such as genomics, nanotechnology, AI, etc. Yes, there is much more certainty now, but that doesn't mean the need for sci-fi went away. We can't use 50-year old "blueprints" (like Childhood's End) to explain how technology would work to people, because now we know better.
So I still don't see the answer. Why hard sci-fi becomes less popular (and this isn't an American phenomenon, this happens in other countries too and is discussed there as well).
I disagree. What is needed is a basic 3D-enable flat desktop. Basically a capable engine where you can do something as simple as place 3D objects (icons, but 3D) on a flat surface. Add to that the ability to move windows back and forth (add depth). Now you have something which is as functional as traditional desktop, but (if you add enough effects) looks extremely cool.
When you make this functional solution available, people can start experimenting with it. Soon working solutions that are more 3D will evolve. We don't know exactly what should be done, that's why we should proceed in small steps.
Another impotant thing is controls. Mouse is simply not good enough, unless you create an intelligent cursor and the desktop itself that would provide for extremely context-sensitive actions.
I think the problem is the idiot programmers don't know how to code, not 3D per se. I had the same problems with their BridgeBuilder with GeForce4 Ti4200. On highest quality settings it runs at 10 fucking fps. Does it look a lot better than Doom3? Nope, it fucking doesn't.
Fortunately, my eyes just ignored the bullshit in this article and it wasn't even passed to my visual cortex. :) But thanks for the rebuttal, hopefully this will help some readers.
Sure, action movies have no quick and jerky movies whatsover and the only reason Wachowsky brothers introduced the sol-mo effects, was to work around the limitations of the human eye.
The truth is that TV programs and movies are filmed WITH motion blur. That means that every frame (for films) is made during 1/24th of a second. It's actualy a superposition of all the trillions of images that were projected to the camera during that time. Our eye gets all the light that was destined for it, the only thing that we lose is a bit of temporal resolution - we don't know what happened in the beginning of the frame and what in the end - it's all blurred. In computer games every frame is in fact a moment in time, not a superposition of moments. That's why 24 fps is not enough for a game (although many people can play at such fps, some can't, while 24fps in movies is generally ok for everyone). Addition motion blur would help, but the trick is that calculating motion blur for 3D games is almost as computationally intensive, as just upping the fps rate, since you need to calculate all frames anyway in order to superimpose them.